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Made possible by an
Emily Hall Tremaine
Exhibition Award

And by the
Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust

Front Cover Papa Colo, Superman 51. West Side Highway, New York City, U.S. 1977
Back Cover: Nao Bustma nte, America the Beautiful. Lima, Peru, July 10, 2002
Inside Cover Marfa Teresa Hincapi e. Vitrina iSiwp Window). Bogota. Colombia. 1989
lnsicle Back Cover: Jorge f1clson. Nage (Nataci6n / S•vimminy), f'Jri s. r1 dll LC, 1959

J
 ACTIONS
BY ARTISTS
OF THE
AMERICAS
1960-2000

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO

EDITED BY DEBORAH CULLEN
CONTENTS
6 Foreword and Acknowledgements
Julian Zugazagoitia

12 Arte -:f. Vida: An Introduction to the Project

Deborah Cullen

16 A Chronology of Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000

Deborah Cullen

58 Points East, West, and South:

Actions in New York, California, and Puerto Rico
Deborah Cullen

84 Action Art in Argentina from 1960: The Body (Ex)posed I

Ana Longoni

102 Naked Man, Flaming Chickens:

A Brief History of Brazilian Performance Art
Claudia Cal irman

114 An Art of Nooks :

Notes on Non-Objectual Experiences in Vene zuela
Gabriela Rangel

134 Conditions, Roads, and Genealogies

of Mexican Conceptualism, 1921-1993
Mar is Bustamante
l

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l 152 Fragmented Corpus: Actions in Lima, 1966-2000
Sharon Lerner Rizo-Patr6n and Jorge Villacorta Chavez

l 162 Chilean Art and Action:

Subverting Order, Performing Change
Robert Neustadt

180 A Cuban Fight Against the Demons (of Oblivion)

l Elvis Fuentes

1 198 The Body as Instrument of Expression :

Action Art in the Dominican Republic
Sayuri Guzman

204 Performance and Action Work in Central America,

1960-2000: A Political and Aesthetic Choice
Virginia Perez-Ration

J 21 4 Maria Teresa Hincapie : Action, Corporeality,

and the Realm of the Feminine in Colombia
J M aria Iovino

J 224 Textos en Espanol

300 Bibliography

306 Artists Index

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 Foreword
I
and Acknowledgements
__lion Zugazagoitia, Director, El Museo del Barrio, New York
El Museo del Barrio is proud to present the groundbreaking
~·Jblication
Arte 7: Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas,
, 960-2000. This historical resource was compiled from
research carried out towards the exhibition of the same
le, presented at El Museo del Barrio, New York City, from
January 31 to May 18, 2008 . This volume focuses on the
- 3rformative contributions of artists from throughout the
"mericas, including Latinos in the United States, Puerto
Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central and
uth America, as well as those creators who travel and
work in locations around the world. Seeking to establish a
1
1ronology of key works, this publication begins to
u(J dress the lack of information on this important strand of
Caribbean and Latin American artistic production.
1rough this study, we can begin to see how these artists
prefigure, link to, and differ from the received history of
")erformance art". Our comprehensive resource spotlights
rne historical contributions these artists have made to this
oarticular area of art history.
Arte :;t: Vida commences El Museo 's 40 1h anniversary
~lebration and a long-awaited renovation of our fac ility.
Much as El Museo thrives in its balance, straddling both
our founding community, El Barrio, and Fifth Avenue's
\useum Mile, this project celebrates and honors our
founding director Raphael Montanez Ortiz, whose avant-
urde actions we re renowned within th e international
artistic avant-garde, long before he inaugurated El Museo
riel Barrio in 1969. In similar ways, the actions presented
.. .=;re reso nate with Montanez Ortiz's twin concerns: the
local and the global. While they are particularly important
' us, we believe they are equally relevant to the art world
at large. We should, however, admit our pride towards
+he role our home base, New York, has played in this
..! story: while many artists traveled to "The Big Apple" to
make works, many others have been supported in special
·ays by our sister institutions, such as the Americas
Society (formerly the Center for lnteramerican Relations),
c-onklin Furnace, Exit Art, and the Hemispheric Institute
1ur Performance and Politics at New York University,
whose endeavors we have sought to highlight.
Raphael f'v1ontail eL Ortiz, Hennv Penny Piano Dt!Situction Conc;ert IVith Paper Bag o,.stmct/Ji t, Nt: loJ York Ci ty, u :.; ' 1967
Embodying El Museo's mission and experimental founding
spirit, this landmark survey is a vital response by our
institution to the increasing public interest and specialized
study in the field. Squarely at the crossroads of this
invigorating dialogue, El Museo strives to contribute to the
original scholarship on Latino, Caribbean, and Latin
American art. Through the diligent scholarship and
curatorship of Dr. Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial
Programs at El Museo de l Barrio, Arte 7: Vida was
generated as the natural continuation of research
conducted during the presentation of a special version of
the traveling exhibition, No lo flames performance (Don't
Call It Performance), curated by Poco Barragan and
Deborah Cullen, and hosted by El Museo in 2004. Seeking
to fi ll the void identified during that initial research, this
seminal publication and its conjoined exhibition offer an
exciting and challenging glimpse into the actions of both
well-known and little-known artists, although many more
can and should be included . With this, we hope to inspire
future sc holarship in this wi de-open field .
On behalf of the Board of Tru stees and the Staff of
El Museo del Barrio, I would like to especially thank the
Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation , who generously granted
Debo rah Cullen a prestigious 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine
Exhibition Award to afford th e early support crucial in
deve lop in g such a complex undertaking . Without thei r
imm edia te and generous response, this project would not
have come to fruition. Equally, El Museo is indebted to
our long and close relationship to th e Jacques and
Natasha Gelman Trust, which supports our cutting-edge
contemporary projects and acquisitions. They rose
immediately to the challenge of wo rking with us on this
development. We thank th e New York State Coun cil on
th e A rts and the New York City Depa rtme nt of Cultural
Affairs , w ho have supported , in part, all of El Museo's o n-
going exhibition programs.
In a project as multi-faceted and ephemeral as this, we
have been fortunate to count on the support and
collaboration of numerous individuals and organizations.
7
First and foremost, we would like to thank the artists .
Whether individuals or collaborative groups, they are the
creators of the compelling expression that inspired us to
undertake this project. Particularly, we wish to recognize
those who were included in the exhibition, Arte :;t: Vida. So
many of them not only willingly lent their own work, but
they also often provided contextual information, as well
as contacts and suggestions for other artists and scholars .
They were our first and best allies. The artists included in
the exhibition were: Adal, with Rev. Pedro Pietri; Rossano
Agois, Wiley Ludena, Hugo Salazar del Alcazar &
Armando Williams; Rodolfo Aguerreberry; Julio Flores,
Guillermo Kexel; Carlos Altamirano; Francis Alys; Asco;
Arte Calle; Diego Barboza; Artur Barrio; Oscar Bony;
Border Art Workshop / Taller de Arte Fronterizo; Jacobo
Borges; Tania Bruguera; Maris Bustamante; Nao
Bustamante; CADA; Miguel-Angel Cardenas; Maria
Fernanda Cardoso; Graciela Carnevale; Lygia Clark;
Colectivo Sociedad Civil ; Papo Colo; Eduardo Costa;
Arturo Cuenca; Cyclona; Jaime Davidovich; Angel
Delgado; Eugenio Dittborn; Juan Downey; Jorge Eielson;
Felipe Ehrenberg; Diamela Eltit; Marco Antonio Ettedgui;
The Fabulous Nobodies; Eduardo Favario; Liliana
Felipe & Jesusa Rodriguez; Rafael Ferrer; Teo Freytes;
Coco Fusco; Regina Jose Galindo; Fernando Garcia;
Guillermo G6mez-Pena; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; GRAV;
Alberto Greco; Victor Grippo; Grupo Chaclacayo;
Grupo Provisional; Maria Teresa Hincapie; Alfredo Jaar;
Roberto Jacoby; Yeni y Nan; Kenneth Kemble; KMAN;
Tony Labat; David Lamelas; Carlos Leppe; Silvana Lora;
Richard A. Lou; Juan Loyola; Leopolda Moler; Antonio
Manuel; Liliana Maresca; Teresa Margolies; Daniel Joseph
Martinez; Oscar Masotta; Alonso Mateo; Cildo Meireles;
Ana Mendieta; Maldito Menendez; Freddie Mercado
Velasquez; Marta Minujin; Raphael Montanez Ortiz;
Charlotte Moorman with Claudio Perna ; NADA;
No Grupo; Glexis Novoa w ith Grupo Civico; Helio
Oiticica; Clemente Padin; Lygia Pope; Rolando Pena;
Polvo de Gallina Negro; Proceso Pentagono; Geo Ripley;
Ritual Art-De, featuring Juan-Si Gonzalez; Carlos
Rodriguez Cardenas; Lotty Rosenfeld; Elizabeth Sisco,
Louis Hock & David Avalos; Santiago Sierra; Antonieta
Sosa; Leandro Soto; El Techo de Ia Ballena; Elena Tejada-
Herrera; Pedro Teran; Todos Estrellas/ All Stars;
Cesar Trasobares ; Carmelita Tropicana; Teresa Trujillo;
Tucuman Arde; Tunga; Nicolas Garcia Uribu ru; Eugenia
Vargas; Edgardo Antonio Vigo; Eduardo Villanes; Alfred
Wenemoser; Carlos Zerpa; and Raul Zurita.
Historical live work is, necessarily, presented through
documentation-primarily still photography or video
perspectives . Many photographers and filmmakers
generously documented other artists' actions, thus allowing
a window to peek into, and remember, their creativity. To
these artists, too, we are grateful, and they include:
Rodolfo Alcaraz, Lourdes Almeyda, Adrian Arias, Peter
Barker, Rene Bertholo, Manuel Boluarte, Carlos "Bora/'
Will Brown, Cesar Carneiro, Armando Castillo, Christa
Courie, Nicolas Delgado, Rufino de Mingo, Juan Downey,
James Elliot, Jose A. Figeroa, Fuerza Aerea de Chile,
Harry Gamboa, Jr., Eduardo Gil, Daniel Gonzalez,
Juan Gonzalez Loyola, Luis Alphonsus Guimaraes, Paula
Heredia, Alejandro Kuropatwa, Dona Ann McAdams,
Susan Meiselas, Carlos Militello, Daisy Mora, Ana Viloria
Mussy, Billy Name, Lorie Novak, Alfredo Nunez,
Fernando Paes, Photo Carlos, Ana Pulido Bartlett, Jose Luis
Ramirez, Lula Rodrigues and Wilton Montenegro, Jorge
Roiger, Dagoberto Roque, Ross Rudesch Harley,
Montserrat Santamaria, Marta Sentis, Doris Spencer de
Barboza, Taller Pedro Teran, Ruben Valencia, Julio
Vengoechea, Santiago Yanes, and Sergio Zevallos.
We are particularly grateful to the collaboration and
support of our founding Director, Raphael Montanez Ortiz,
and his wife, Monique Arndt-Ortiz. In New York, several
sister institutions generously opened their resources to us.
At the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics,
we are grateful to Diana Taylor, Director; Jill Lane, Deputy
Director; Marcial Godoy-Anativia, Associate Director;
Marlene Ramirez-Cancio, Assistant Director of Arts & Media;
and Mila Aponte Gonzalez, Video Archive Curator . .AJ
Franklin Furnace Archive, we thank Martha Wi lson,
Founding Director; Michael Katchen , Senior Archivi st; and
Harley Spiller, Administrator. At Exit Art, we recognize
Jeanette lngberman, Co-Founder and Director and Audrey
Christensen, Director of Archives and New Media.
We are indebted to the lenders, who parted with works
for the duration of the exhibition, and authorized the use
of their images. Additionally we recognize the many who
aided us in locating or selecting works. In many instances,
th ese were one and the same group, and they are the
Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Yes. No, Maybe, El Mus eo del Barrio, New York City, US, January 31, 2008
arti sts' families , colleagues (who often documented
works for themL estates, or representation . This project
would not have been possible without such international
collaboration and we thank them most sincerely. In New
York, we are appreciative of the generosity of Carolyn
Alexander, Director and Amy Levin, Co-Director and
Registrar, Alexander and Bonin; lsabela Villanueva,
Assistant Curator, Americas Society; The Juan Downey
Foundation; Christo and Jean-Claude; Bellatrix Hubert,
Partner/Director and Amy Davila , Marketing Director,
David Zwirner; the Estate of Ana Mendieta; Michelle
Reyes, Director, The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation;
Mary Sabbatino, Director, Wade Miller, Registrar, and
Stephanie Joson , Archivist, Galerie Lelong ; John G.
Hanhardt; Vanessa Critchell, Director, Luhring Augustine
Gallery; Michele Maccarone, Director and Ellen Langan
and Jasmin Tfou , Maccarone Gallery; Valerie Smith ,
Chief Curator and Hitomi Iwasaki, Associate Curator,
Queens Museum of Art; Carla Stellweg; Marcia Acita,
Assistant Director and Tom Eccles, Executive Director,
Marieluise Hessel Collection , Hessel Museum of Art,
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; John
Perreault; and Sarvia Jasso, Assistant Director and
Yasmine Dubois, Sales Assistant, The Project.
In other parts of the United States, the project found equal
support. Ju st "next door," in Philadelphia, we thank Janet
Samuel, Registrar, and Aaron lgler, Media Consultant,
The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Further south , in
Miami , we warmly embraced all the support and
information which came unstintingly from Glexis Novoa.
We should note here, as well, our own Curator Elvis
Fuente s's particular affection for this material and the
countle ss hours he spent especially on the work s by
Cuban and , equall y, Cuban-American artists. We also
thank Adalberto Delgado and Janet Paparelli; Jose A.
Figueroa and Cristina Vives; Juan-Si Gonzalez and
Carlos Perez Vidal; Art Kendallman ; Helen Kohen ,
Vasari Project Archives and Denise Delgado, Curator,
Art Services and Exhibitions, Miami-Dade Public Library
System; Rafael Salazar; and Cesar Trasobares. Across
in California , we would like to thank Chon Noriega ,
Director, and Michael R. Stone, Manuscripts Processor/
Film and Video Project Manager, The Fire of Life : The
Robert Legorreta-Cyclona Collection, The UCLA Chicano
Studies Research Center Library and Archive; Gallery
Paule Anglim , San Francisco; and Michael Schnorr and
the Border Art Workshop .
9
I would like to mention in particular Gabriela Rangel,
Director of Visual Arts, The Americas Society, who offered
incisive and informed feedback through the development
of the project, serving as an advisor and sounding board,
due to her own enthusiastic interest in these materials . In
particular, she should be commended for stewarding the
Venezuelan selection along with her colleague, Sagrario
Berti, who conducted primary research on behalf of El
Museo in Venezuela, and couriered the precious materials
to our door. Javier Tellez offered contacts and Marguerite
Mayhall shared her dissertation materials with us. We note
the lenders Doris Spencer of the Doris Spencer de Barboza
Collection; Berenice and Marcos Ettedgui; Daniel
Gonzalez; Juan Gonzalez Loyola; Fundacion Museos
Nacionales - Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas;
Ignacio and Valentina Oberto; and The Perna Foundation.
In locating and selecting works by Argentinean artists, we
are indebted to Ana Longoni , Professor, Universidad de
Buenos Aires, Research Fellow at the National Research
Council of Argentina, a spec ialist on the topic, who
generously aided and commented on the works. We are
warmly appreciative of independent curator and scholar,
Victoria Noorthoorn, who shared unreservedly her own
original research on the field, in tribute to her long solidarity
wi th the work of El Museo. Most particularly, Victoria
studied and selected key representations from the vast and
important production of Marta Minujin, with whom she
had been work ing closely. This work was critical to the
project. W e are also graleful to Carola Bony, the Estate
of Oscar Bony and MALBA-Fundacion Costantini; Lourdes
Castro and Archives KWY, Portugal; Fernando Davis;
Nidia Olmos de Grippo and the Estate of Victor Grippo;
Trinidad, Ana and Ignac io Fombella; Ana Maria Gualtieri
at Fundacion Centro de Artes Visuales de La Plata and
Centro Experimenta l Vigo; Eduardo Gil; Van ina Greco; Luz
and Mauro Herl itzka ; Maria Jose Herrera and Mariana
Marchesi; Valerie Hillings; Julieta Kemble and Adriana
Pedrosa; Julio Le Pare, Eli Jimenez Le Pare, and Estrellita
Brodsky; Jorge Lopez Anaya; Susana Lijtmaer; Cecilia
Molina, Praxi s International Art, Buenos Aires; Patricia
Rizzo; Montserrat Santamaria; Estela Totah, Director, Del
lnfinito Arte; Almendra Vilela; and Cecily Marcus .
In Brazil, we were aided by many professionals. First and
foremost, w e recogni ze ou1· f1·iend and co lleagu e, Cla udia
Calirman, independent scholar, curator, and author of the
forthcoming Brazilian Art Under the Dictatorship (Duke
University Press), who was available throughout the project
and aided us in discerning the intricacies of several
important oeuvres. As well, our friend Antonio Manuel and
his wife Marisa kindly went beyond the call of duty, aiding
us with not only his own work, but with that of others. We
thank his gallery Nora Roesler, and most especially Nora
Roesler and Marli Matsumoto, Directors. At the Associac;:ao
Culturai"O Mundo de Lygia Clark," Sao Paulo, we worked
closely with Alvaro and Alessandro Clark, and Curator
Felipe Scovino on the final selections. We appreciate the
generosity of Cezinha Oiticica at Projeto Helio Oiticica,
Rio de Janeiro, and we are indebted to the enthusiastic
collaboration of filmmaker and artist Ivan Cardoso. At Projeto
Lygia Pope, Rio de Janeiro, Paula Pope as well as Jose
Mario Brandao responded to our requests; We are indebted
to Fernando Cesar Sant'Anna and Bianca Peregrini, who
were crucial to Tunga's important representation .
The very strong Chilean representation, and the project in
general, benefited from the insights and collegiality of
Robert Neustadt, Professor, Northern Arizona University.
Additionally, Marilys Belt de Downey, a long and stalwart
comrade to El Museo del Barrio, unstintingly shared her
recollections, comments, and materials. We are also
grateful to Justo Pastor Mellado, Art Theoretician and to
Carlos Leppe 's assistant, Alfredo Barrios Fernandez. In
Bogota, Maria Iovino, Independent scholar and curator,
offered a discerning view, particularl y on the work of
Maria Teresa Hincapi e ( 1956- 2008), w hose brief bu t
spectaculm tmjectory has affected us all. W e thank most
affectionately Catalina Casas , Director, Galeria Casas
Riegner; as we ll as Camila Barrera, Manuel Angel, and
Juan Gallo, Director, Alcuadrado Gallery, Bogota. In
Peru , a fountain of new information has been forthcoming.
We are grateful to these emergin g scholar and curators,
most especiall y Sharon Lerner Rizo-Patron , and Jorge
Villacorta Chavez, both pmfessors at Pontificia Universidad
Catolica del Peru, Lima, and also Emilio Tarazona, Miguel
Lopez, Max Hernandez Calvo, and Jose Ignacio Padilla_
We thank our colleague, curator and scholar Gustavo
Buntinx; Martha Canfield and Centro Studi Jorge Eielson
for the Diffusion of Hispano-American Culture, Milan ;
and the artists Sergio Zevallos, Berlin , and Rocio "Chio"
Flores, in New York, for their open generosity as well.
l
l
In the Caribbean, we found many willing partners. In
l Puerto Rico, key figures offered materials, including Elaine
Delgado, Director of Visual Arts, the Institute of Puerto
Rican Culture and photographer Daisy Mora. In the
Dominican Republic, we are grateful to Sayuri Guzman,
artist and independent curator, as well as to Ouisqueya
Lora, Fundaci6n Taller Publico Silvano Lora, and
Alberto Lara . As always, our long-time friends and very
special artists, Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Scherezade, and
!Iiana Emilia Garcia aided in our efforts. In researching
works by Mexican artists, Maris Bustamante, artist and
director, Centro de Artes, Humanidades y Ciencias
Transdisciplinarias, Mexico D.F., offered images, contacts,
and her wise counsel. As well, Galeria Nina Menocal ;
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Heidi Grivas, Registrar
Lisson Gallery, London; Fernando Llanos/se Feliz consume
VIDEO; and Victor Munoz were forthcoming with
materials. Our colleague, the artist Pablo Helguera, was
also a source of information , inspiration , and contacts.
We have learned a great deal from our dear colleague
in Costa Rica, Virginia Perez-Ratton, Founding Director,
TEOR/ eTica, San Jose, regarding the elusive but vibrant
earlier scene of artists' actions throughout Central America.
For representation of the burgeoning Guatemalan
performance scene, we thank Ida Pisani, Director, and
Cristina Rota, both of Prometeo Gallery, Milan.
Several colleagues offered support and counsel in
general, in ways large and small, and we thank them.
Here we note most especially Gilbert Vicario-wh o
answered numemus phone ca lls and emails with cheer,
from the vast resource tha t is the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston . Additionally, we note Miriam Basilio, Carlos
Basualdo, and Sergio Besso, all fellow-travelers in the
important work being done on Latino and Latin American
art. We are grateful to them.
The Board and I ioin in commending Deborah Cullen,
the proiect's curator and ed itor, and the entire curatorial
team , who wo rked tirelessly to make this effort a reality.
A proiect so very complex and wide-ranging consumes
the entire staff, and we express our appreciation for th e
thoughtful contributions of Elvis Fuentes, Curator; Rebeca
Noriega-Costas , Special Proiects Coordinator; Eli za beth
Borne, Curatorial Assistant; Noel Valentin, Registrar;
Melisa Luion, Assistant Registrar; and Trinidad Fombella,
Collection Management Coordinator. All worthwhile
proiects are the result of many persons ioining forces to
bring together all institutional aspects, and the Board
and I ioin in thanking the entire staff of El Museo del
Barrio through all its departments, particularly Helena
Vidal, Director of Education; Lili Santiago Silva, Theatre
Manager; Gonzalo Casols, Public Programs Coordinator;
Julio Marrero, Director of Operations; Susan Delvalle,
Director of External Affairs; Matthew Bregman, Director
of Development; Peter Ryan , Director of Finance; and
llano Stallman, Museum Shop Manager. Many fine
interns from graduate and undergraduate programs also
aided in the development of the research for Arte;t:Vida,
and we have benefitted from their fresh intellect. They
are Arden Decker, Natalie Dupecher, Joanna Groarke,
Marisa Lerer, and Andrea Ortufio . We are equally
indebted to our fluid translator, Odile Cisneros, who has
worked with us over several years; our video editor, the
artist Claudia Joskowicz; and our sensitive photographer,
Jason Mandella. The beauty and clarity of this publication
speaks to the loving attention of our wonderful and long-
time graphic designer, Elvira Moran.
This publication offers a comprehensive chronology to
linger over and to marvel . In-depth, bilingual, and well-
illustrated regional overviews, by respected yet fresh
voices in the field , allow us to understand the contexts
and traiectories of the burgeoning performative scene
in each of ten areas. These authors, as noted above, not
only offered cruc ial texts but also served as curatori a l
advi so rs to their regions at Iorg e. I acknowledge the
generous intellectual contr ibuti ons of Ana Longoni,
Argentina; Claudia Calirmon, Brazil; Gabriela Rangel,
Venezuela; Maris Bustamante, Mexico; Sharon Lerner
Rizo-Patr6n and Jorge Villacorta Chavez, Peru ; Robert
Neustadt, Chile; Elvis Fuentes, Cuba; Sayuri Guzman ,
Dominican Republic; Virginia Perez-Ration, Central
America; and Maria lovino-Co lombia. A comprehensive
bibliog raphy and an artists' index rounds out the use
value of this volume.
We know you wi ll enioy this proiect and learn as much as
we did. For every three or four household names, we
present you with well over one hundred. And here, we are
only scratching at the surface.
11
Arte ::1- Vida: An Introduction to the Project
Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo del Barrio, New York
This publication surveys performative actions created
over the last four decades by artists from throughout the
Americas. With this volume, El Museo del Barrio begins
to address the lack of readily available information on
an important strand of Caribbean, Latino, and Latin
American artistic production . These artists are rarely
mentioned in the received histories of performance art,
which generally highlight only European, North American,
and select South American and Asian creators. Presented
through documentation- photo stills, video perspectives,
writings, ephemera, and related materials- these
selected actions are but fleeting and often low-resolution
and partial glimpses . Without actually attending the
myriad actions that have transpired all over the globe in
real time and space, we can only imagine the fullness ,
depth, and emotional impact of each event. Nonetheless,
this anthology provides an overview of previously
overlooked creativity.
Actions are interactive events, taking place in the street
or another public space, in the museum , gallery, or
privately, and they generally employ the body of the
artist or his/her surrogate in a direct relationship to a
live, or removed-witting or unwitting-audience .
Actions differ from full-scale, narrative theatrical stage
presentations (which separate the artists from viewers),
dance, readings or spoken word, circus customs,
traditional folk art activities, or direct political actions
with no explicit artistic intention, although in many cases
they draw from common roots and strateg ies. The actions
fo cused on in this publication are intentional acts staged
by fine artists with a rich trajectory of performative
practice, or who have carried out events so important as
to become landmark.
Performance employs many media and intermedia, and
prominent performance art historians, including RoseLee
Goldberg, tend to be flexible and open in their definitions
of the interdisciplinary genre.l In Western culture,
performative actions by artists generally trace their roots
to th e beginning of the 20th century, wi th the Dadai sts
and their activities at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, founded
in 1916. Arguably, live interventions by Latin American
artists have taken place since pre-Columbian times, with
non-western precursors that could include tribal rituals and
cultural celebrations, or even their own bodies' exhibition
under colonial conditions.2 In the latter twentieth-century,
performance art (or actions more rigidly defined) is seen
to be part of the continuity of the visual arts, normally
related to avant-garde or conceptual practice.
In the sector of production we study here, much of the
works have subtle or overt political contexts and content.
Over these last four decades when performance has
flourished , Caribbean and Latin American communities
have endured military dictatorships, civil wars,
disappearances, invasions, brutality, censorship, civi l
rights vio lations , immigration issues, demographic
expansions, discrimination, and economic woes nearly
unabated. Certainly, at times, the works refer to their
specific circumstances, contexts, and reference po in ts .
But beyond this generalized comment, it cannot be said
that there are any commona lities that serve to separate
Latin American actions from those created by artists of
any other cultural group-with the exception of the
identity of its creators. The works are diverse in content
and approach, and are by turns moving, provocative,
funny, athletic, for mal, and oneiric.
The ti tl e of this project, Arte :;t: Vida (Art is Not Life)
troub les the commonp lace idea that art is equivalent to
life, and life is art. What is proposed through these many
works is that while art affirms and celebrates life with a
regenerative force , and sharpens and provokes our
critical senses, artistic actions that address inequalities
and conflict are not equivalent to real life endured under
actual repress ion.
The phrase, which was a favored slogan of Vladimir
Tatlin, the Russian artist-leader of the 1920s avant-garde
modernist movement, has become a cliche, covering
disparate topics including Japanese post-war work as
well as progressive American mid-century developments .
Wolf Vostell, a German artist and early progenito r
Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores. Guillermo Kexel. Siluetazo (Si/houtte Action). Buenos Aires, Argentina. September 21. 1983
of Happenings who worked closely with the Fluxus
group, stated, "Art is equivalent to Life- Life equivalent
to Art." Another German, Joseph Beuys, formulated hi s
central theoretical concepts concerning the soc ial,
cultural, and political function and potential of art.
Indebted to Romantic writers such as Navalis and
Sc hiller, Beuys was motivated by a uto pian belief in
the power of universal human creativity and was
confident in the potential for art to bring about
revolutionary change. Beuys romanticized and mythified
the role of art and the artist. This translated into Beuys 's
formulation of the concept of Social Sculpture, in
which soc iety as a whole was to be regarded as one
great work of art (the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk) to
which each person can creatively contribute . Beuys
famously proclaimed (borrowing from Navali s), "every
human being is an artist. "3
Robert Rau schen berg di stincti vely noted that he wished
to work " in the gap between art and life ." However,
avant-garde composer John Cage, who worked in a
tra jectory rela ted to Rauschenbt~rg , succ inctly described
the difference between art and life by discussing what he
termed "critical " and "compos itiona l" actions, regard ing
the Vietnam War:
You know, my tendency is to think of these activities-
of protest, and of parades, and objections, and all
these things-a s being like critical actions rather than
composing actions. I know, in my case and certain ly
in you r case, that nothing that the criti c said stopped
me from composin g. Now it seems to me that the
war is not going to be stopped by critical action, or,
if it is stopped that it will be succeeded by anoth er
war, et cetera. I think something li ke a composing
action needs to be made rather than like a critical
action , in order to bring about a world where
these things to which we clearly and righ~ully object
wi ll not take place. 4
13
This idea has, incidentally, been examined elsewhere in
modern music history. Greil Marcus has written about the
tendency to conflate art with life in popular music. In his
analysis of the 1960s American folk revival, which based
itself on 1930s precursors, he noted that artistic actions
during this time became bound up in concepts of
authenticity, and the most valued form was suffering,
deprivation, and exclusion. According to Marcus, a
complete dissolution of art into life values the poor as the
purest form of art, because they act without mediation
and without reflection, without consciousness of capitalism
or other over-determining factors . Marcus's case study,
Bob Dylan, struggled with this very issue, complaining
that audiences mistook his artwork for a protest or
political action, thereby confusing the object with the
subject. Marcus noted, "when art is confused with life, it
is not merely that art is lost. When art equa ls life th ere is
no art, but when life equals art there are no people." 5
Arfe :;t Vida cal ls attention to this blurred critical
boundary by examining these deliberate and inventive
actions within their varying contexts and discourses.
Local production ebbed and flowed over time in
response to specific political and social circumstances,
but also in dialogue wi th larger artistic and international
currents. Eleven essays review the significant but
ephemeral bodies of work the developed by artists
working in New York, Californ ia, and Puerto Rico;
Argentina; Brazil; Venezuela; Mexico; Peru; Chile; Cuba
and Miami; Do mini can Republic; Central America ,
particularly Guatema la; and Colombia. Efforts have
bu1·geoned by re gion , ove1· time, depending 011 th e
surround in g support or an tag on izing circumstanc es .
In the early 1960s a few very important precursors such
as Alejandro Jodorwosky and Te cho de Ia Ball ena
carried out actions in var ious places drawing upon the
tenants and experimental spi1·i t of Dada ism and
Surrealism. Also du ring th is time, artists particularly from
Argentina were explming ideas of signaling . Key figures
such as Alberto G1·eco highlighted phenomenon of the
real world or daily life as an extension of Marcel
Duchamp's philosophies, and in dialogue with nouveau
realisfe figures such as Yves Klein or Piero Manzoni.
From the mid-to-late-1960s, artists from the United States
us well as Argentina were examin ing and th eor izing the
processes of destructivism . During a time of social
change, class struggle, inner-city blight, strikes, the onset
of the Vietnam War and Latin America's military
dictatorships, important artists including El Museo's
founding director, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, and Marta
Minujin channeled the forces of destruction that they saw
all around them, harnessing it as a creative action that
offered a springboard for a new approaches, unfettered
by antiquated orders .
During the mid- to late 1960s and 1970s, neoconcretist
artists in Brazil broke out of artistic constraints in another
way. While maintaining a connection to the principles of
geometric abstraction developed by the earlier Brazilian
Concrete artists, Lygia Clark, Helio Oticica, and others
began to incorporate organic, expressive, and
interactive elements into their works. Under the influence
of Merleau-Ponty's theorie s of phenomenology, the
neoconcretists straddled two- and three-dimensional
space, creating artworks that require the participation
of the spectator in order to reintroduce art into the social
sphere. By th e late 1960s, burning questions in the
contemporary milieu spurred the creation of socially and
politically activist works in Argen tina and Venezuela.
Making direct and overt reference to economic
disparities, human rights violations, and social and
political ills, actions by groups such as Tucuman Arde
or Jacobo Borges were performed in the service of
revolution and in the hope fm change.
In 1964 Marshall Mcluhan published hi s semina l work,
Understanding Media, on the immense psychological,
soc ial, and cultural effects of media. Mcluha n impmtantly
argued that it was not the content expressed through the
medium, but the medium itself that affected society. Taking
a cue from these theories, artists like Roberto Jacoby and
Eduardo Costa began using television s, radios, and ta pe
recorders as their med iums. Th e introduction of such
untraditional aesthetics aided in the expos ure of ma ss
media's transformative role in interpersonal relationships
all the while providing a new platform for artists to begin
redefining contemporary art practice, using the medium
as the message.
Another strand of production that occurred around the
world from the late 1960s through the 1970s was "The
Happening." The term , coined in 1959 by U.S . artist
Allan Kaprow, describes a performance or event that
could only occur once . The term was adopted by
Rolando Pena, Leopolda Moler, and others to describe a
wide range of live art events that are ohen multidisciplinary,
spontaneous, or interactive. Many other artists through
the 1970s engaged the land and their bodies . The
natural environment and the human body became
significant points of reference for artists such as Ana
Mendieta, Juan Downey, Jorge Eielson, and others
working in the late 1960s and the 1970s to comment on
society, politics, violence, gender, or art itself, as wel l as
the relationship between man and nature.
Since the early 1970s, Mexican and Mexican-American
artists served as literal and figurative border crossers.
By evoking and challenging the delineations and
e~istence of borders through conceptual practices,
pe rformance actions, intervention s, and even street
theater, artists like Asco and Proceso Pent6gono exposed
the ramifications of boundaries on immigration, identity,
and community in an attempt-to incite change within art
institution s and society at large.
By the late 1970s and into the 1980s, artists, particularly
in Chile, utilized radical , multi-disciplinary approaches
to address the atrociti es committed by South American
military dictatorship s. CADA, Lotty Rosenfeld , and
Alfredo Jaar are just a few of tho se which could be
mentioned here. Oth er artists, suc h as Cuban ar tists
including Glexis Novoa or Tony Labat, introduced humor
as a device for commun ica ting the ir messages. Whi le
committed to social and political issues, th eir works
challenged, provoked, and subverted social norms
through the use of comedy, parody, and satire. At the
same time, artists such as Tunga and Antonieta Sosa
evoked symbolic or fantastic imagery, allegory, and
mythology, to contrast a more didactic or overt approach.
The 1990s were marked by a heightened awareness of
cultura l diversity and identity politics . The year 1992
marked the Ouincentennary of the Spanish occupation
of the Americas, which prompted many Caribbean,
Latino, and Latin Am erican artists to create works that
responded to the legacy of this landmark event as we ll
as to the phenomenon of multiculturalism . Leaders in this
arena would include Guillermo G6mez-Pena , Coco
Fusco, and the Border Art Workshop. Dominican artists
like Si lvana Lora , Colombian artists including Maria
Teresa Hincapie, and artists from Centra l America such
as Regina Jose Galindo also developed strong bodies
of work in the later 20 1h century.
In order to view not only the precise contexts, but also
the larger panorama of performative development, we
provide an integrated chronology of key works . This
initia l effort to synth es ize transnational progressions
follows the format of the original exhibition from wh ich
this anthology developed, where works were grouped in
a rough chronologie order, loosely grouped by themes
and not regions. However, much scholarship rema ins to
be done. Each action deserves an entire narrati on;
many artists and movements require further study in
disserta tions or books. Finally, th is separate, yet rich
chrono logy should be folded in to the larger, global
history of performative actions, compared, con trasted,
and scrutinized . Only then will we beg in to see a more
complete picture.

1 Rose Lee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, rev. sub. edition, 2001 ); Rose Lee Goldberg,
Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (London: Thames and Hud son Ltd, 1998)
2 Coco Fusco, "The Other History of Intercultural Performance," English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: Nev
Press, 1995). 37-64
3 Along the same lines as Beuys, an important German or t historian of the period, Udo Kulturmonn, wrote the 1971 book Art into Life summing
up the previous decode by proposing that artists were shaman or healers, leading society in new directions.
4 Joh n Cage ond Morton Feldman , Radio Happenings 1- V, 1966-1967 (Cologne Musik Texte, 1993). 153.
5 Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York MacMilla n, 200 1). 28-29.

15
 l

en el Techo de Ia Ballena
A Chronology J

HOMENAJE A~·· ·· •.~~J

lO
m'·;~J
CURSI r.(: Efdt11 of Actions by
Artists of the
Americas,
1960-2000
Deborah Cullen
This selected chronology has been compiled from: an original timeline by
the author, created for the exhibition, Nolo !lames performance, curated by
Poco Barragan and Deborah Cullen (New York: El Museo del Barrio, August
18-November 7, 2004); the checklist of works included in the exhibition ,
Arte ;t: Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, curated by
Deborah Cullen (New York: El Museo del Barrio, January 31-May 18,
2008); interviews and conversations with artists and colleagues; individual
mtist's archives at El Museo del Barrio and publications in our library related
to these artists and movements; the contents of the essays included in this
publication, and from severa l important printed sources . In particular, we
note the following: the proceed ings from the Primer Coloquio
Latinoamericano de Arte No-Obietual; and the books, Out of Actions.
Between Performance and the Obiect 1949-1979; Corpus Delecti:
Performance Art of the Americas; Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin
America; The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico,
1968-1997; Killing Time; and Beginning With a Bang! From Confrontation
to Intim acy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960-2007
Please consult the bibliography at the back of this volume for additional and
full citations. While efforts have been made to be as inclusive as possible,
due to space limitations, all works by all artists have not been included, but
rather a curated selection of works, highlighting the earlier gestures, have
been noted. Equally, brief mentions of key events are cited as reference
points. Numerous additional works and events could be incorporated
into an entirely different proiect.

16
1957
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
"Destructivism A Manifesto" (1957- 1962)
New York City, US
1958
ALFREDO STROESSN~R eECOM!-S
PRESIDENT OF PARAGUAY, REMAINING
UNTIL 1988. UNDER HIS GOVERNMENT. UP
TO 3,000 PEOPlE WERE KIDNAPPED,
TORTURED AND ASS.ASSINATELl.
1959
THE CuBAN REVOLUTION TiliU 1r k
AND FIDEL CASTRO BECOMES PR!JI.. [
MINISTER. INITIATING. AS HE HAS
Ct\tlEO IT, Tlif DiCTATORSHIP Of
THE PROI.ETAR!AT."
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
first "destructions" (1959-1961)
New York City, US
1960
Al berto Greco
street actions: flyers and posters announce.
"Greco, que grande sos"
("Greco, How Great You Are")
Buenos Aires. Argentina
1961
THE U.S. BREAKS DIPLOMATIC
1962
JAMAICA AND TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
RELATIONS WITH CUBA. BECOME INDEPENOHJT.
U.S. SUPPORTED CUBAN EXIlES THE U.S.S.R PROPOSES tWILOING
AriEMPT AND FAlliN THE BAY OF PIGS MISSILE BASES IN CUBf( PRECIPITATIN
I ·Nr SION O~J CtJB,I\ THE CUBAN MISSitE CP.ISI" . THf U.
BLOCKADES THE fSt A"JO.
THE U.S.-SUPPORTtO UICTATOR OF TilE
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, RAFAEL
TRUJillO, IS ASSASSINATED.
U. 'S. PRFSIDEN rJOHN EKENNEDY'S
All Ar~CE FOfl PROGRESS" PROGRA .~
GRAV
lnstabilite (Instability)
Maison des Beaux-Arts. Paris, France; Galerie
du Groupe N Padova, Italy; Galerie Danese,
Milan, Italy; The Contemporaries Gallery, 992
(1961-l!Xi9) SEEKS ECONOMIC COOPERA11fl ~ Madison Avenue, New York City, US; later
h[: 1Wl:H•1 NORTH AND SOUTH AMER!Cli
travels to Belgium, Brazil, and Argentina
Rffn.Br ·. Ar-.JO PLVELOPI\~ENT.
ir GERMANY, l Ht UERLIN WAU IS Alberto Greco
tRLGHO, fJIVIiJIN!i fA" f fROM Wf.S r. Primera exposici6n de Arte Vivo
(First Exhibition of Living Art)
March 17
El Techo de Ia Ballena
Paris, France
Para Ia Restituci6n del Magma
(For the Restitution of Magma)
March
Caracas, Venezuela
Alberto Greco
Non-invitational action outside exhibition,
Alberto Greco, obra de arte fuera de catalogo
(Alberto Greco, work of art outside the catalogue)
l El Techo de Ia Ballena
Greco is signed by Yves Klein; then he signs a
Homenaje a Ia cursileria (Homage to Schmaltz)
beggar and a duchess with Klein's pen
June
March 13
Garage, El Conde Caracas, Venezuela
Exhibition, Antagonismes 2. L'Objet
Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France
2 Arte Destructivo (Destruction Art) exhibition
conceived hy Kenneth Kemble with
3 Alberto Greco
Enrique Oarilari. JorgeLopezAnilya, Jmge Roigcr.
Firs Vivo-Dito (Lit ing Finqer)
Anton o Segui, Silvia Torrasan L11isAlberto Veils
Paris. France
Statement~ by Kenneth Kemble and
.~ Ida Pellegrini 3rc published
Alberto Greco
November 20 -30
Manifesto Vi~ o-Dito
Galeria Lirolay, Buenos Aires. Argentina
El Techo de Ia Ballena
With poem by Caopolican Ova lies
t Duemw UstcJ Setlor Presidente 7
First version in Ital ian; Genoa. Italy
Annotated and corrected on successi'. 8
occasions including Piedralavcs. Avila, Spain.
1963
(Are )au Asleep. 11!/t. President?)
Silvano lora
Carac ls. Venezuela
FoundsGrupo Artey Liberacon
(Art and Liberation Group)
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
t'uchaeological Finds (1961-1967)
New York City, US
4 El Techo de Ia Ballena
El Homenaje a Ia Necrofilia
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal.
(Homage to Necrophilia)
and Roland Topor
November
The Panic Movement & Ephemeral Shows
Caracas, Vene7llela
(1961--1964)
Paris, France and Mexico City, Mexico
17
 1963
U.S. PRESiDENT JOHN E KFNNEDY IS
1964
ftiF U.S. ";H DS TROOPS TO
ASSASSINATED IN DAllAS TfXI\S. OOMINICI\N BfPUBUC.

IN URUGUAY, TH NATIONf\ 1 Ull Rl\H'JiJ BR .. ZIL!Ar~ PRE~IOFN"i JOAO GOULA T

MOVr:MENf (TUPAMAROS) A Gllf!!HIU
RfSISTANCt GflO!JP FUHM('.
I Marta Minujin
Exhibits works with Lourdes Castro and
Alejandro Otero and then presents action
with col laborators Eric Beynom, Lourdes Castro,
Christo, Robert Ri lliou, Eli Charles Flaman,
Paul Gette, and Manuel Hernandez.
Jean-Jacques Lebel attends, among others
La Destrucci6n (Destruction)
June 8
Impasse Ronsin(lent by Larry Rivers,
JeanTi nguely, and Niki de Saint-Phalle)
Paris, France
IS OVfflTdflOWN :JY TilE 1\-llfT/IRY.
IHIMREif!'O DE Aln~CAR CASTHO
.-:Lt;O , f rBtsluun ,~J P. MIUTAR·
~our. RUilrJING THE fOUNDATiot~ FDH
I
T!lf ANTI DEMOCRATICGOVERNMENT,
l HAT ro11 OW MARSHAL ARTUH OA
(;OSTA f Sll VA (1%7- 1969, AND GFNfRil
l
r ' '0 "ARRr.-, ~AZU MfOICI i19fi9 n ;,
'· . LT\JRF S.JAS~INATF . /\NO
C)A "F,. R OPPOMN1r. . M'!'OH[)IN• I
llf :INCOMPUHI ~;JMHl-'H 0
. f\MJ _c:: ·" !'i·

Alberto Greco Al ejandro Jodorowsl<y

Un momenta de Vivo-Dito Viaje de Pie en Effmero de San Carlos
Metro de Sol a Lavapies (Ephemeral Work, San Carlos)
(A Moment of Living Finger Art. Journey on Apri l
Foot in the Metro from Sol to Lavapies) Mexico City, Mexico
October
Subway, Madrid, Spain Alberto Greco
Mi Madrid Querida (My Beloved Madrid)
2 Alberto Greco December 9
Autorretrato Vivo-Dito (Self-Portrait Vito-Dito) Galerfa Bonino and Plaza San Martin
Piedra laves, Avila, Spain Buenos Aires. Argentina

3lygia Clark Ma rta Minujin

Canllnilando (WaiAing) CJbalgata (Cat c~'cadu I
Rio d8 Ja11eiru, Brazil T\' Ch:;r;el 7
Buenos ,\ires, ArgcntinJ
Marta Minujin
Leyendo hs noticias en el Rio de Ia Plat 'I .t Helio Oiticica
(Reading the Netvs in thu Plata Ri\'er) Paran::Jules (1964-1968)
Rio de Ia Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina Rio de Janeiro. Brazil

Alejandro Jodorowsky GRAV

Canto a/ oceano (Song to the Ocean) Lah)Tinth
At the unveiling of a mural by Manuel Felguerez Happening with other artists
Oeportivo Bahia recreation center, Paris, France
Mexico City, Mexico
Juan Jose Gurrola
Juan Jose Gurrola with Juan Vicente Due/a Je flashes (Duel of Flashes I
Melo, Juan Garcia Ponce and Carlos B;:n Los Lobos. Acapulco, Guerrero. Mexico
Monsivais
Jazz Palabra (Jazz Word)
Mexico City, Mexico

18
:J I '

il 1965
DEMONSTRATIONS AGAINST VOl f R- La Muerte (Death)
REGISTRATION RULES OCCUR IN SEI MA With Dalila Puzzovio, Ruben Santantonin,
Al BAMA LEADING INTO THf CIVIl Zulema Ciordia, Delia Cancela,
,!GHTS STRUGGlE David Meseiean, Carlos Squirru.
Edgardo Gimenez and Antonio Berni
TS BREAK OiJT IN 1Ht /AilS Galeria Lirolay, Buenos Aires, Argentina
ECTION OF lOS ANulLE5.
Microevents
U . fORCFS FfARfl • A f(lMMUN ·ST With Marilu Marini. Edgardo Gimenez. Alfredo
1A1<EOVER OCrLIPY HE tH!MINI ArJ Rodriguez Arias and Miguel Angel Rondano
. PLJBLIC Teatro La Recova, Buenos Aires, Argentina
A
Jorge Bonino
Bonino aclara cie1tas dudas
GRAV
(Bonino Clarifies Some Doubts)
Lauvrinthe 3, New York
Cordoba, Argentina
February 16-March 6
The Contemporaries Gallery,
Arman, with Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri
992 Madison Avenue, New York City, US;
And mcludmg Ayo, George Brecht, Christo,
Biennale de Paris, France
William Copely, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein,
Marta Minujfn and Ruben Santantonin Claes Uldenburg, Dieter Roth, Niki de Saint
With Pablo Suarez. David Lame/as. Rouolfo Phalle and Andy Warhol and Alberto Greco
Artist Key Club's Locker Lottery and
Pray6n, Florea I Amor, and Leopolda Maler
La Menesunda (The Drug on the Market)
Alberto Greco, Rifa Vito-Dito
Grand Central Station, New York City, US
May
lnstituto TorcuatoDi Tel Ia, Buenos Aires. Argentina
Rolando Peiia
With Jose Ignacio Cabrujas and Domingo Alvarc
Marta Minujin
Suceso Plastico (Fine Arts Event) Homenaje a Miller(Homage to Miller)
School of Architecture and Urban Planning,
July 25
Estadio de Peiiarol de fvlontevideo. Uruguay Unrversrdad Cen tral de Venezuela, Caracas

Helio Oiticica El Teatro Campesino

form:;, /':)ti IJ' Luis Valde<
Parango/es
Jebuted by /VIagucin Schon I of Samb1 dane ?r~· Firs: pldy fr1r United FarmvJor!:er :, Un;on
Exhibition opening, Opinan 6'5 De/an,I, CJiilornia. US
August 12
iviuseu de Arte lv1orb rra. Rio d~ Jdneiro. Brc1iil Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Dustn.rtion Ritual Heali.'ations (1965-197~)
5 El Techo de Ia Ballena New York City, LJ S
Protesta flO! Ia Ei.posici6n Sa!rn Pegaso
(Protest of the Ptfgasus Salon Exhibition)
October
Caracas. Vcnr.zucla

Al ejandro Jodorowsky
Hacia el effmero p<lnico n iSacar a/ tcatro
del tea trot
(Making an l:p!Jemeral Panic. or Tc1Ae the
T/wat1e out of Theatre')
Manifesto
Me ico City, Mexico

19

1966
GUATEMALAN DEATH SUUAOS BEGIN
FORCED DISAPPEARANCES UNDERTHE
GOVERNMENT OF JULIO CESAR MENDEZ
MONTENEGRO. TO THE PRESENT. 38,000
CASES HAVE BEEN DOCUMENTED.
MAO ZUJONG LMJNCHES THE CULTURAL
REVOLUTION IN CHI~JA.
Marta Minujfn
El Batacazo (The Long Shot)
February 6
Bianchini Gallery, New York, US (previously
exhibited at Institute Torcuato Di Tella
Buenos Aires. Argentina)
1 GRAV
A Day in the Street
Tuesday, April19, 8 am-11 pm
Paris. France
2 Teresa Trujillo
Liquidaci6n de una pia tea
(Clearance of tho Orchestra I
Monday, August 15
Teatro Circular
Montevideo, Uruguay
3 Arte de los Medios
(Art of the Mass Media)
(Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, RaCII Escari)
Primera obra de arte de los medias.
Happening patJ un jabalf difunto
(First Work of Art of the Mass Media
Happemi1g for a Otictased Boari
El Mundo nev; paper
Sunday, August21
Buen0s Ai rPs, Argentina
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Piano Destruction Concert
August
fnr BBC TV. London. England
20
l
4 0/AS 1966(Destruction in Art Symposium)
August 31 - September 30
Africa Center. London. England
DIAS Destruction in Art Symposium
September 9-1 1
Africa Center, London, England
Participants include Gustav Metzger and John
Sharkey (organizers). Gunter Brus, Susan Cahn,
Henri Chopin, lvor Davies, Ener Donagh, AI
Hansen, Juan Hidalgo, Dick Higgins. Alison
Knowles, Kurt Kren, John Latham, Raphael
Montanez Ortiz, Charlotte Moorman, Otto
Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Yoko Ono, Robin Page,
Nam June Paik, Bryant Patterson, Werner
Schreib, John Sexton, Graham Stevens, Jean
Tache. Wolf Vostell, and Peter Weibel
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Fi rst public Destruction Realizations
Press Conference and Chair Destruction,
August 31, St. Bride Institute, London, England
DIASat Speakers' Comer, with Ernst
Flesichmann, Gustav Metzger.
September 3, Hyde Park. London
An Evening with Ralph Ortiz,
September 5, Better Books, London
Paper Bag Event, September 12. Conway Hall,
Red Lions Street, London
Discussion on DIAS, chaired by
John J Sharkey, with lvor Davies, AI Hansen,
Gustav Metzger, and Jasia Reichardt,
September 20, ICA. London
Self-Destruction. September L2, MetlUI',
Theatre. London
Dli1S Final tvent. Event-Film. with I ·iark Bo~ie,
John Latham. Yoi.o Ono, September 30.
f\tbcury Theatre. London
Raul Escari
Entre en discontinuidad
(Enter into Discontinuit) )
October 8
Buenrs A irr ~ . /\r~J8 'lti n~
Ricardo Carreira
La accion oncadenada(Chained Act/1n)
October
Exhibition, Anti!Jienal
Cordoba, Argentina
 Eduardo Costa Eduardo Costa, Roberto Jacoby
Recorte de contexto ISlice of Context) and Juan Risuleo
October 15-30 Poemas ilustrados (Illustrated Poems)
Exhibition, Antibienal Literatura oral (Oral Literature)
Cordoba, Argentina lnstituto Torcuato Di Tella
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Collaborative artists
En el mundo hay sitio para todos 8 Eduardo Costa (with Juan Risuelo)
(There s Room in the World for Everyone) Fashion Fiction I (Ears of Gold). 1966-1968
October Published in Vogue in 1968 (photographed by
Exhibition, Antibienal Richard Avedon, with Mariano Schiano and
Cordoba. Argentina Marisa Berenson, models, and Lawrence
Alloway's quotes)
l 5 Marta Minujin Fashion Fiction I, 1968
Simultaneidad en simultaneidad Published on the cover of Harpers Bazaar,
(Simu/taneitv in Simultaneity, aka ears for col lector Lita Hornick,
Three-Country Happening) photographed by Hiro, 1969
with Wolf Voste ll in Cologne New York City, US
and Allan Kaprow in New York
October 24 Felipe Buendia
Center for Audiovisual Experimentation Intervention
lnstituto Torcuato Di Tella Exhibition opening, Arte Nuevo
Buenos Ai res, Argentina Ombligo d Adan. Lima, Peru

6 Oscar Masotta
Para lnducir a! Espiritu de Ia Imagen
ITo Induce the Spirit of the Image)
October 26
lnstituto Torcuato Di Tel Ia
Buenos Aires. Argentina

Organizers Oscar Bony, Eduardo Costa,

Roberto Jacoby, Leopoldo Maier, Pablo
Suarez, and Miguel Angel Telechea, in
collaboration with Oscar Masotta
Sabre Hap{Jeninys IOn Happmings, four
remakes one 'I"Ork by Michael Kirby,
t11;ov•arks by Claes Oldenburg, including
Autobodies, and Carolee Scheemann's fv1edt Jnr)
November
lnstituto Torcuato Di Tella
Buenos Aires. Argentina

7 David Lame las

Seiialamiento de Ttcs Objutos
(Signal!ing T!uee Objects)
Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1966:
Hyde Park, London: 1968;
Slovakia. 1969

21
 1967
HIOTS OCCUfl :N SPf1NISH HARlEM, Ralph Ortiz I
N W ·,'ORK; OETHOI , MH H'GAN; Melting Pot
BIR~Ir~liHAM fi.ABAJVIA; 1\r~O September 29-30
UlHfR CITitS 5th Annua l New York Avant Garde Festiva l
JF. Kennedy Ferry Boat, Whitehall Terminal,
tilE GUEVA' Staten Island Ferry, New York, US
Orga nized by Charlotte Moorman. with
Joseph Beuys, George Brecht. John Cage,
AI Hansen, Hi Red Center Group, Dick Higgins.
Allan Kaprow, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Yoko Ono.
NamJune Paik, Ben Patterson, Tomas Schmrt.
Carolee Schneemann, Jean Tache, Wolf Vostell,
Emmett Williams and La Monte Young.

Raphe! Ortiz
12 Evenings of Manipulations
October 5-22
. I ~:I
Judson Gallery, New York City, US
Organized by John Hendricks, with
Malcolm Goldste in, AI Hansen,
1 Roberto Jacoby Bici Forbes Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks,
Mao v Peron 1m solo coraz6n
Allan Kaprow, Kate Millet. Lil Picard,
(Mao and Peron A Single Heart)
Steve Rose, Carolee Schne mann, and
March 26 Jean Tache; Film and performance by
Hippie "Be-In," Central Park, New York City, US
Phillip Corner. Takahiko limura, Ken Jacobs,
Fred Lieberman, Charlotte rvioorman, Yoko Ono,
Alejandro Jodorowsky Nam June Paik, Tomas Schmit. and Ken Warner
Piano destruction
April 3 Raphael Montanez-Ortiz
Juan Lopez Moctezuma's television talk show
Hennv Penny Piano Destruction Concert
Mexico City, Mexico
with Paper Bag Destruction
Artist's studio invitational
Oscar Masotta ~l ew Yor~ City, U.S.
El helicoptero (The Helicopter)
July 16 Juan Jose Gurrola with
lnstituto Torcuato Di Tella
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Buenos ;\ires. Argentina
Frailes deja vu(Friar deja l'u) .
Point Xto Hotel Tcquendama, Uogotd. Coloml' rd
2 Rolando Pen a
and The Foundation for the Totality
Jose luis Cuevas

I
The Paella-Bicycle-Totalit) -Crucifixion
Mural Efunero (Ephemeral mural)
September Billboard on the corn r of Genova and Londres
Heme of \'Va!rln O i~z Balar Ea ~ t H1mnton.
Streets. ZOira Rosa, f'.lexic City, Me>;cL!
New York. US
lncludPd in Andy Warhol's '''' (Four Stars).
4lygia Pape
1967 and The Loves of Ondine. 1968
0 Ova (Tile Egg)
Rio de Janeiro. Brazil

5lygia Clark
Mascaras sensoridis (Sensorial Masks)
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Marta Minujin
5 Minuphone
New York City, US
 1968
ROBEHT F !(Fi~NEO Y AND MARTIN lliTHHi
KING, JR. AflE ASSASSINATED IN TB[ U.S
CHICANO STUOfNTS LEAD "BROWr ·
JllTS" IN lOS :~NGttEt- AIMED. ,r
1 Di Tella. Buenos Aires, Argentina
iMrROVING SCHOOL CONOIT!ONS.
MM 1%8 :-, f'JOENT PRO i tSTS lN lt:Jll
AN!l ()I hER C'll£$
DURiNG Till G0Vi::RNMEN1 OF GU51A\I(
[1!/\Z ORUAZ, 1\ FXWAN Mil IT RY (l!" J'
!1fTAIN, : ORTURt Ar~D Kll! OVr-1~ 'lUU
;:, l UD· rJTS A1 rtlr r IASSAc::L or
r•JI E.OLV.l
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
The Death of White Henny and Black Penny
DIAS USA, March 22
Judson Gallery, New York City, US
With Jon Hendricks , AI Hansen. Bici Hendricks,
Charlotte Moorman, Hermann Nitsch,
Nam June Paik, and Lil Picard
Destruction Art Group Presents
May 10 - 19
Eduardo Ruano
BreJks V.Jindow ,lis~ !, 'i ng poster uf US
President John r. Kennedy
April 3D
Exh ibition opening, Premia Vt:r vEstimar
Museo de Ar1c Moclerno. Buenos Aires, Argentina
Marta Minujin
Minucodc
4 cocktail parties; Presentation 1\iay 27- June 8
Center for lntt]r-Amerrciln Relations
Nel'i York City, US
6 Nicolas Garcia Uriburu
1·Coloration (Colorations series. 1968- prPsr;nt)
Granu Canal. Venice. Italy
Exhibition, BiennaiP di Venezia
Pablo Suarez
Letter to Jorge Romero Brest, May 13
Exhibition, 1968 Experiences, lnstituto Torcuato
7 Oscar Bony
La familia obrera (The Working Class Family)
Exhibition, 1968 Experiences, lnstituto Torcuato
Di Tel Ia, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Collaborative artists
Destruction of their work
Exhibition, 1968 Experiences, lnstituto Torcuato
Di Tel la, Buenos Ai res, Argentina
Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos
Proposes to exhibit a pedigreed bull and
sell its semen (rejected)
Exhibition, 1968 Experiences, lnstituto Torcuato
Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Juan Pablo Renzi, Norberta Puzzolo,
Rodolfo Elizalde, and others
"Assault" on Jorge Romero Brest
July 12
Sala, Amigos del Arte, Rosario, Argentina
Helio Oiticica (with Antonio Manuel.
lygia Pape, Jackson Ribeiro, Rogerio
Duarte, Roberto lanari, and John Cage,
among others)
Apocalipop6tcse, July 6- 28
Exhibitron. Arte noAterra Urn Mes de Arte
Piiblica. I\ krseu de Arte Jlorlerna
1
Rio rie Janeiro. B"!Zil
8 Eduardo Favario
Obra Clausurada ICiosed Work)
Septem ber 9
Cicio de Arte Experimenta l, Rosar io, Argentina
Beatriz Balve, leon Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby,
Margarita Paska, Pablo Suarez and others
O) tng fuuntains red
September
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Rodolfo Elizalde and Emilio Ghiolini
Street "Fight"
September
Argentina
9 Graciela Carnevale
Encierro y escape (Confinement and Escape )
October 8
Cicio de Arte Experimental, Rosario, Argentina
23
 1 Edgardo Antonio Vigo lygia Pape
Sefialamiento no. 1, Manojo de semaforos Divisor
(Signal Point No.7, Bunch of Traffic Lights) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Manifiesto "Primera no-Presentacion Blanca"
("First White No-Presentation") 4lygia Clark
October 25 Oculos sensoria sis (Goggles)
Buenos Aires, Argentina From the Objectos sensoriasis series
(Sensorial Objects series)
2 Rafael Ferrer Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Three Leaf Piece
December 4 lygia Clark
29 W 57 Street Oeueotu(Thelandthe You)
4 E 77 Street From the Roupa-Corpo-Roupa series
103 W 108 Street (Clothing-Body-Clothing series)
Leo Castelli Galleries, New York City, US Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Jorge Bonino Juan Downey

Asfixiones o Enunciados Faites le vous meme (Do it Yourself)
(Asfictions or Statements) Paris, France
Argentina
Lea Lublin
3 Jacobo Borges, artistic director
lnnocente Palacios, producer
Imagen de Caracas (Image of Caracas)
"Dispositivo Ciudad"
Flu via Sub tunal (Subterranea flow)
and Terranauts
Buenos Aires, Argentina l
Caracas, Venezuela Felipe Ehrenberg
Par que pinto c6mo pinto
j
Raphael Montanez Ortiz (Why I Pai/Jt the Way I Do)
Piano Destruction Concert Exhibition, Kinekaligrafica, Alameda Central
Johnny Carson television show Galerfa de Ia Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico J

Orlando Menicucci Edgardo Gimenez, Dalila Puzzovio,

Performance\Vith monol ogue and frame
Universiclad Catol ica Madre y Maestra
Dominican Republic
Fed erico Manuel Peralta Ramos
f'viandamientos ganicos
(Feellikeit commandments)
Buenos Aires, Argentina 5 Tucumiin
and Carlos Squirru
Porque son tan geniales?
(Why Are We So Great?)
Billboard
Intersection Florida and Via monte
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Arde (Tucumiin is burning)
Streets and Confederacion General del Trabajo
de los Argentinas (CGTA trade union offices)
9 1enos /J. re: Jnd Rns~rio. ll,rgenti na

24
 AI '1- ' o
l
6
l
1969
S,.ONH\IAll RIOTS !1· 1 NfW '1'0111< CITY
'W''N fHE ·. Y RICH,!-. r.10VfMENT.
, Rmsurs IJETWH ~J liON DURA\ · NO
l Sl'iVAOO!i
OUBI"JG Rt)MULO PI 'lA!K UHf S lAST
YEIUI AS PRESIDE!IJT Of VENPUtlA A 't:
RAtil lE-ONi SlltllE. 0Vri1 1,PIJO CASE~ · f
· OR!~H£ M~SSACRE'
' I~Ap;> -AilAW ·. t Ni· 0' f
Samuel Feij oo
Spontaneous actions while speaking on the
popular arts, late 1960s
Santa Clara and other locations, Cuba
Eduardo Costa, Hannah Weiner, and
John Perreault. organ izers
The Fashion Show Poetry Event
With work by James Lee Byars, Enrique Castro-Cid,
Man D'Arcangelo, Rubens Gerchman, Alex Katz,
Nicolas Krushenick, Les Levine, Marisol,
Claes Olclenberg, Roberto Plate,
Alfredo Rodriguez Arias, Juan Stoppani,
James Rosenquist, Susana Salgado (Pesce),
Sylvra Stone, Marjorie Strider, and Andy Warhol Belvedere Park, East Los Angeles
January 14
Center for Inter-American Relations,
New York City, US
Slides ami videotape, February 12
St Mark's Church. NC\'1 York City, US
Eduardo Costa
Useful Art Ww ks
lncludeclrn Street Works I
Featuring works IJy Vito Hannibal Acconci,
Shusaka Arakawa. Greg01y Battcock.
Scott Burton. James Lee Byars.
Rosemarie Castoro. John Giorno, Bill Creston.
Stephen Kaltenbach. Les Levine. Lucy Lippard.
BLillJddte [\layer, IV1cr idith t\1onk, Ben PJttersGn,
John Perreault, Marjorie Strrder, 1r. l .
.!\nne Waldman. Hannah We iner)
Saturday, March 15
42'' Street - 52 · Street, Madison to Sixth
Avenue, New York City, US
6 Juan Downey
A Fire Sculpture
May 22
Grand Ballroom. Mayflower Hntel
Washington DC. US
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
at the request of the New York City Board of
Education, conceives of El Museo del Barrio
June
Juan Downey
Invisible Energy Dictates a Dance Concert
August 11, Smithsonian Institution, Washington
D.C. and Cinemateque, New York City, US., 1970
7 Rafael Ferrer and Robert Morris
FRARMRRIREEROFIBSEATERLR
(Robert Morris, Rafael Ferrer)
September 2
Universi dad de Puerto Rico-MayagUez
Puerto Rico
8 Juan Downey
Boycott Grapes
September 19-21
Lunn Gallery
Washington DC , US
9 Gronk (writer and director); starring
Cyclona (aka Robert legoretta)
Caca Roaches Have No Friends
November 1969
Californ ia, US
1oJorge Eielson
Nage ISwimming I
Paris. France
Eduardo Costa and John Perreault, editors
[qpe Poems. First Publication, 500 copies:
(including works by Vito Hannibal Acconc r,
Michael Benedikt. Scott Burton.
Ted Castle & Leadro Katz, John Giorno,
Joseph Ceravolo. Dan Graham.
Bernadette Mayer, Ann Waldman,
Lewis Warsh, Hannah Weiner)
New York City, US
Juan luis Rodriguez
(aka Rodriguez Sibaja)
El Com bate IThe Fight)
Exhibition. VI Biennaie de Paris. Franre
Antonieta Sosa
Destroys Plataforma // (Platform II)
Early September
Previously exhibi ted in Stele OIJ;rtos Blancos
Ateneo de Caracas, Venezuela
25
 1970 3 Antonio Manuel

OE ·•t
TA'
0 corpo ea obra (The Body is the Work)
May
XIX Sa lao de Arte Moclerna
.;
Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

4 Rafael Ferrer
2 Deflected Fountain, for Marcel Duchamp
May
Plaza fountain, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Pennsylvania, US

1 Artur Barrio 5 Rafael Ferrer

Trouxas Ensanguentadas. SITUA~AO 50 Cakes of Ice
(Bloody Bundles. SITUATION, 1968- 1970) June 30
April 17-21 E.hibition, Information
Municipal Park, Bela Horizonte, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, US
Minas Gerais, Brazil
Exhibition, From the Body to the Earth

Thereza Simoes
Felipe Ehrenherg
A Stroll in July
July, 6 hours
I
Stamps including worrls Dirt,v. Verboten. London, Enalond
Fragile, and Act Silently
April17-21 Clemente Padin
Municipal Park. Bela Horitol'te La pocsia debe ser hecha par tndos
Minas Gerais. Brazil
Exhibition, From the Body to the Earth
(Poetry Should be Made by Everyone ) I
September 30
Hall. Universidacl de Ia Republica
Lee Jaffe Montevideo, Uruguay
Sugar on dirt road
April17-21 Felipe Ehrenberg

4
Munici pal Park, Br.ln Horizo11te
Minas Gerais, Brazil
A Date t\'ith Fate Jt the Tate (w; Ta te Bail)
OLtoiJer 21
I
Exl•iiJitill:l, From the Rodr to tiit Earf.11 The Tate ~.lu se um. London, Enqi nd

Luis Alphonsus Guimaraes 6 Felipe Ehrenberg and

i~a~<l llll 011 fif tc:;n-mL:u I:J:incJ J't T:'"c the Po lygonal Workshop
April17-21 The 7th Day Chicken
Municipal Park. Bela Horizon te October
Minas Gerais. Brazil Sigi Krauss Gall101 , London. England
Exhibition, From the Bodr ro tile Eani.
Felipe Ehrenberg
2 Cildo Meireles Tubn 0-Nauts Travels
Tindentes. To tem-Monumento ao Preso ~l rJVe mber. 17 hours and 50 minutes
5 Politico (Tiradentes. Tutem-A /onument to tile Londun, England
Political Prisoner)
April2 1 7 Edgardo Antonio Vi go
f\il unicipal Park. Belo I iorizontc Setlaiamiento nu 5. Unpaseo l seal a 13 PlwJ
Minas Gerais, Brazil Ruben Daria (Stgnal Point No 5, A Visuall \lalk
Exhibition, From the Body to tile Earth t/uough Plaza Ruben Daria)
November 8
Plaza Ruben Daria. Buenos Aires, Argentina
 Juan Downey 9 Cyclona
Pollution Robot A Chicano Wedding The Marriage of
Howard Wise Gallery, New York City, US Marfa Theresa Conchita and Ching6n
June 3
8 Margarita Azurdia (aka Margot Fanjul) Campus of California State University
Favor quitarse los zapatos Los Angeles. California. US
(Please Take Off Your Shoes)
II Coltejer Biennale. Medellin. Colombia Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos
Letter to the Guggenheim Foundation
Nicolas Garcia Uriburu June 14
Green New York. Intercontinental Projt?ct Buenos Aires. Argentina
of Waters Environment
Bonino Gallery and The East River As co
New York City, US Stations of the Cross
December 24
David lamelas Whittier Boulevard to Goodrich Boulevard
Time East Los Angeles, California. US
Buenos Aires. Argentina
Sigfreda Chacon. Ibrahim Nebreday,
Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos and William Stone
Reads poetry and sings "non-figurative son~s" El Autortis(The Bus)
by the artist and Jorge de Ia Vega Ateneo de Caracas. Venezuela
Ta to Bores' television program
Buenos Aires. Argentina 10 leopoldo Maler
Crane Ballet
lvonne von Mollendorf Camden Festival of Music
Narrative dance piece London, England
lnstituto de /\rte Contemporcineo. LimJ, reru
Carlos Ginzburg
Cildo Meireles Tierra (Earth)
Insertions into I eolngic.tl (ircu: s scri c~ be~ ins ~ 1useode .1\rte ~-1oce n~o
Coca-Cola bottler, und curr .. ncy Buenrn: ;\ire::. A1 gentiniJ
f11o clc Jc.11t.:rc. 8rr1 ~ ii bili!Jitio11, -1rl in Si Sit?n .s

1. Papo Colo

Nu: York City, II S

10
1971 Gordon Matta-Ciark
Untitled Prr farmance
h hibitiJn. Projects ~u r: es
Pier 18. 1~8W York Cit ~. US

Gordon Matta -Ciark

Gordon Matta-Ciark Tree Dancr
(performing as George Smudge) Vassar College, Poughkeepsie
With Juan Downey-filmmaker. Ted Grcem·;ald. New York, US
. . ~ . .. '.. _ ;,. v ._, . . '!' ;mel Gin[iCr 1. 'fl.'JI~e r
Fresh Air (Cart}. May 1971
Ut\lVFRSl . . TIS PORTORICENSIS
J 4'· · r r·
.,; <\l\W~o ~otott -..utn!~t·o
~~. ~
,,
Wall Street. New York. US

·I · r

11
. r. , .. r;,n · lG .I.I 'IJ

?7
1972
THE WATEF<f. '· Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos
M'. SIHNli TOf~ El objeto es el sujeto
(The Object is the Subject)
Centro de Arte y Comunicaci6n
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Marta Minujin
Nicappening
Parke Bernet Gallery, New York City, US

Ana Mendieta
Self Portraits
Facial Cosmetic Variations
Untitled (Death of a Chicken)
University of Iowa, Iowa Ci ty, Iowa, US.

Gordon Matta-Ciark
Teresa Burga
Performers hide beneath piles of leaves,
Autorretrato Estructura-lnforme
then run away
(Self Portrait Structure-Report)
112 Greene Street, New York City, US
June 9
Li ma, Peru
Migu el -Angel Cardenas
Gardena Reheats the Regulier Canal
Juan Downey and Marta Minujin
(Ca1dena recalienta el Canal Regulierj
lnterppening
Amsterdam. the Netherlands
August
Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art
4 Miguel-Angel Cardenas
New York City, US
Gardena Reheats Mont Blanc
(Gardena recalienta el Monte Blanco)
1 Victor Grippo
Yellow Now Gallery, Liege, Belgium
(with artist Jorge Gamarra and rural
worker A Rossi)
Lygia Clarl<
Traditional Rurcl OI'CI' IN Alc~hnn B1c;:d
Collecti~e Bodr(1972--1975)
September, one cia·/ •
Sorbonnc. Paris. France
Exhibition. r1rt and ld1::olom 111 t.'A \ C
(Centro do Arte'/ Comuniracion)
Luis Diaz
Plaza Roberto Arlt, Buenos Air~s. Argentina
Grahadosa Ia rueda (!Nh:;tfl Pri'lt··)
Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue
2 Asco
Zona One, Guatemala City, Guate:nala
Walking Mural
December 24
Whittier Boulevard. East Los Angeles
s Anna Bella Geiger J
Circummambulatio
California, US
Rio de Janiero, Brazil
3 As co
Jorge Eielson 1
Spraypaint LACMA
El cuerpo de Giula-no
(aka Project Pie in OelFacej
(The Body of Giulia-no )
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles, California, US
Biennale di Vcnciia. Italy I
 1973 9 Marta Minujin
Kidnappening
August 3-4
Sculpture Garden
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, US

Pedro Teran
Cuerpo de exposici6n (Exhibition Body)
Caracas, Venezuela

IOAsco
No-Movies (1913- ca.1980)
Los Angeles, California, US

Carlos leppe
Happening de Gallinas (Hen Happening)
' . Santiago, Chile

6 Juan Downey Ana Mendieta

Plato Now Untitled(Rape Scene)
January 7 Clinton Piece, Dead on Street
The Everson Museum of Art, Syracusl University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, US
New York, US
Ana Mendieta
7 Antonio Manuel Imagen de Yagul (first Silueta)
Exposi~ao de 0 a 24 horas
Yagul, Mexico
(Exhibition from000 to 2400)
0 Jamal, Arts & Leisure Section lygia Clark
Sunday, July 15 Anthropophagite Slobber
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Cannibalism
Universi te Pari s-Sorbonne, Pdris, France
Proceso Pentagono
Jose Antonio Hernande1 Amezcua Lu is Pazos
(vvith Carlos Finck, Victor 1urioz, Transforrnacwnes 1ie liiS mc~;;as en vivo
Orlando Mendicutti) ILite Transformatrons of the /\,lasses)
DesaparecidoIDisappeared) La Plata, Argenun3
July- September
Palacio de Bellas Artes, fv1e xico City, Mexrco Felipe Ehrenberg
Exhibiti on, A nivel informativo Di splay of the artrst himself
iOn an Informational Level) Exhibition, Artes Chicles, Chocolazes v
Cacaiwatcs(Gum, Chocolate & Peanut 4rts)
8 Proceso Pentagono
Sala Ponce, Palace of Be ll a~ Artes,
Carlos Finck Mexico City, Mexico
(with Jose Antonio HernandezAmezcua,
Victor Munoz, Orlando Mendicutti) Joaquin Mercado
El hombre atropellado Installation of a bull
IThe Man That Has Been Run Over) Galeria Luigi Marrozzini
July-September Old San Juan, Puerto Rico
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico
Exhibition, A nivel informativo
iOn an Informational Level)

?0
 1974
!J.• · ~t t;IDH 1; ' ! · ")()N . ~I · '· Marta Minujin
With Julian Cairo!
Four Presents. Time Aesthetically Registered
Stefanotti Gallery, New York City, US.

Juan Jose Gurrola

Marta Minujin (with Arnalda Coen and Geisen Gas)
Imago Flowing Cinta adhesiva en cruz sabre piedra
September 24 (Adhesive Tape Cross on Stone)
Central Park, New York City, US Mexico City, Mexico
included in the film Robarte e/ Arte (Stealing Ar1)
Ana Mendieta Dokumenta 5, Kassel, Germany
Untitled (Burial Pyramid)
Yagul, Mexico 5 Jorge Eielson
Paracas-Pyramid
Ana Medieta Art Academy, Dusseldorf. Germany
Untitled (Blood & Feathers)
1 Untitled (Blood Sign #2 I Body Tracks) Carlos Ginzburg
Fall What is Art? Prostitution
Iowa City, lovva, US Exhibition, Art of Systems in Latin America
Antwerp, Belgium
Juan Downey
C/11/e sf, JUnta no (Chile Yes. fvlilitary No) Carlos leppe
September 11 Perchero (Coat Hanger)
ITT Headquarters. New Yorl: City, US Santia o. Chile

2 Diego Barboza Carlos leppe

La Caja de Cachicamo(Arrnadillu Box) s Retrato con hi/as (Portrail t\ ith Threads )
October 20 Santiago. Chile ·
Parqut del Este, Caracas, Venezue la
(later sllovm at Parque San Felipe El Fuertr.. Raul Zurita
San Felipe, Ya racuv State. ~ ~~ \' 1. 1g71; an I in a ,Vo pucdu mas (I Can't Take li An} i1h e)
pc~k i nJ lot. Ctl ~;r uu u, Carar,:;, Uc tuw 31, 1c'751 ·3alerlil C'\L. ~a n c l Gl1 Juan Jomingo D d\-'i l ~ ·~
~ a : nriros. Sant:cJg"J, Ci::lt.
3 Juan Downey
T/iG 1 f .'a!1
...'1i.'uan Edua rdo Costa
Tur.sda','. lo,,cml f·r 12 Fa,tr •"1 Firt ifJF II (R-Y·'" nf ·11''-' bHcletJ
i,1iannallanL.ilblc ChannGI IJ, N: ·. ·~ Qr' Cit",. U:,_ photngr~ p ht:ci by lr\'inD PPnn tor 1/eguc.
!man, model (unpublishl,d)
4 As co Nt: _._, 'n r~ City, US
First S•rpper IAftpr t Ala.·or Ri~ t i
December 24
Ar1zona Street at Whittic1 Boulevard
East Los 1\ngcl t;S, Califo1111o, US

4Asco
Instant Mural
East Los Anaeles, Californiil. US

Gordon Matta-Ciark
Clock shower
The Clocktower. lower New York City, US

5
 1975

6 Charlotte Moorman with Cl aud io Perna

Charlotte Moorman en Tucacas
(Charlotte Moorman in Tucacas)
Tucacas, Venezuela
Later shown at
International Video Festival
June 4
Wi th works by Nam June Paik, Kosugi,
Yoko Ono. Roberto Breer, and Joseph Beuys
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caraca s
Venezuela

Marta Minujin
La academia del frxaso (Acao'en,v of Failu'i' )
September 26- 0ctobcr 5
Centro de Arte y Comunicaci6n
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Ana Mendieta
Alma Silueta en Fucg(l (Soul Silouettc un Fir:)
Iowa City, Iowa. US

7 Asco
Decoy GJng W~1r Virti:n
L'S Anar:le'. Ct'difr" ' :a. I) S

8 Silvano lora
I' t9uta d'?H71''ev!fi,! Ul') '> ~~- I' " I
Sailed from He Oor,lill:C!l h:pL:~> <:.
to Cuba in s 1 Jll c":~ v~

Alicia Vitteri
Intervention on 20 cit·: busLv
Panama City, Pa na!P~

9 Cl emente Padin
El artista debe ~ .L - -· '.
(TheAt1ist Must Su.·.c the: Cca"r:.eit;·;
Museu cle i\rtn Conten ,poran,) r'L SaJ fll:":J
Brazil (later sllo,:m at the XVI Biw1al LfrJ
Sao Paulo, Brazil. 1981)

J
9

'1 1
 1976 1 Ana Mendieta
Anima, Silueta de Cohetes
(Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks)
La Ventosa, Mexico

Roberto Evangelista
Mater Dolorosa
Amazon, Brazil

Marta Minujin
Comunicando con tierra
(Communicating with Earth)
Machu Picchu, Peru 1
Manuel Montilla
Metamorbosis ]
Chiriqui, David, Panama

2 Papo Colo )
Walking Sculpture
West Broadway, New York City, US
J_ • \

Papo Colo
Coronation
West Broadway, New York City, US
J
Franklin Furnace
is founded,
supporting avant-garde art forms,
including performance,
New York City, US

l
J
5
J
 1977
US PH~SIDENI JIMMY CAl"! · R11 Kf(
1978
f'f'.NAI'w•i.l !AN l llfJIW L !Gr..! EO.
flU . · G'f !\ MA lOll Of\' '.~ J•
J!r~ JONES' f c;·
AT I ~\F!DF II\ 10 .

Gordon Matta-Ciark
Ana Mendieta
Jacob:, Ladder
La Noche, Yemaya IThe Night, Yemaya)
June
Leipzigerstrasse and Melsungerstrasse Tuesday, March 21
Franklin Furnace, New York, US
Kassel, West Germany
Exhibition, Dokumenta 6
No Grupo
Secuestro plastico (Plastic Kidnap)
Papo Colo
with artist Gunter Gerzo
SupernJan 51
West s:de Highway, New York City June 15
Mexico City, Mexico
No Grupo
Mas: s sent to represent the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres
with Rosa Balsera and Jose Perez Mesa
Fall
XBi.:nnale de Paris, France Wrapped
Mid-September
. J
Plaza Antonia Martinez, University
Tony Labat
Ci11 Jnal Humors of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
S~n FrJncisco, California
Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico

Carlos leppe Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Seer;~ nf the Crime
with Rosa Balsera and Jose Perez Mesa
Santi3go, Chile SoCiety, (aka Melting Society )
Friday, November 3
3 Claudio Perna
Plaza Antonia Martinez, Universi ty of
Jl.ntor1iOMendoza's salsa band, Chicles Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
(CIJt,,\'ing Gum) Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico
Sc , iiJ ssu lpturc
ci ,i;·;• c·n. Once Tipos (E!rxcn Cuj:>) 4 Cesar Trasobares
~'<( j ' IJ Funddci6• 1r •)unciOZil Non-invitational performance
C: ' ' :·, V8nCl d~ld Musco Cul'ano In Arte y C11ltura.
~l i ami. Florida, US
Exh:h ;an op ,ninq. Re-cncuent1.; CuLw·; J
(Cuban Re-Encounter)

5 Tony Labat
(with Mike Osterhout)
Kidnap Attempt
On former artist and political candidate
Lowell Uarling
San Francisco, Cal iforniJ, US

Jorge Eduardo Eielson

Dormir es una oiJra maestra
ITo Sleep is a Masterpiece )
Galleria 9, Milan, lto ly

33
 1979
bCliAOOR RETURNS l UDEMOCRACY. Julio Garcia (Pirosmani)
Materiales de pintura (Painting Materials)
GENERAL HUMBF.RlO ROMERO TAKE<:- January
POWF.R IN El SALVAOOR. CIVIL WAR International Art Center, Havana, Cuba
ENSUES BETWEEN MARXISHEO
INSURGENTS Ar~O THE U.S.-BACKED
Exhibition, Festival de Ia pieza corta
Brisas del Mar, Havana, Cuba
1
r·ovERNMENT, WHICH MAIN rAINS A
SYSTEMATIC PROGRAM OF TORTURE, Felix Gonzalez-Torres ]
DISAPPEARANCE AND MURDER. TV Empty, Empty
BY 19&9 THERE WF.RE APPROXIMATElY March 18, 2 00 p.m.
7,fl' J f!ISAPPEAREP . Teatro, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras l
SANriiNI. 1:\ 1FSLN) llfVOUJTION TAKES CADA
l'llWd~ I iJ,. If'; HAbUA ~N J HJHCF S
Para no morir de hambre en e! arte
!V-AOl: FA! ILY lllJ 0 · RULf (So as Not to Die of Hunger in Art)
1
October 3
HAii !.F !''1 N Ob AHTS, IWATnll Atl
RU ;0' H 'ItO · flNI fAKES OVEH;
'lANIA!'d MILITil.NT~ SWf IJ.S. EMUAS~V
Santiago, Chile
I
Ceilia Vicuna
I·OlO U.S. iHISlfiG[:)
Vasa de !eche vertido en cielo azul (A Glass of
Milk Spilled under a Blue Sky) I
·i ,[ lli)l;\N I~SUBGEN 1,, Quinta de Simon Bolivar, Bogota. Colombia

· f · !H riO ~:1LLAP 'F Eugenio Tellez J

Action wi th milk and text
Toronto City Hall, Canada
Gustavo Perez Monzon
)
Querida Stella (Dear Stella) Tony Labat
January (with lanlreland, Mark Hollander and the Units)
International Art Center, Havana, Cuba West/East
Exhibition, Festival de Ia pieza corta Tuesday, October 16
Brisas del Mar. Havana, Cuba Franklin Furnace, New ork City, US
J
Gory and Raul de Ia Nuez lCADA
A/fa Tasgolfo lrncrsi6n de Esccna(lm ersion of the Scene)
January October 17
International Art Center, Havana, Cuba f'vluseo Nacional de Bellasi\i"Les, ~ anti agQ , Chi!t;
H 1ibition. Fcsti\'a / de Ia pieza co11a
Brisas del Mar. Havana, Cuba 2 Marta Minujln
El Obe!isco de Pan Dulce (Panettone Ofielisl.)
Jose Bedia and Flavio Garcandia December
Una noche en Ia opera (A Night at the Opera) Exhibition. //Feria de las Nacion e~
Buenos Aires, Argentina J
Januarv
International Art Center, Havana, Cuba
Exhibition, Festi1 a/ de Ia pieza cart a Taller de lnvestigacion Plastica (TIP)
Brisas del Mar, Havana. Cuba El fardo IThe Bundle)
Morelia, Mexico
Ricardo Rodriguez Brey and Jose Bedia
El polio canadiense (Canadian Chicken) Alfredo Jaar J
January Studies on Happiness (1979- 1981)
International Art Center, Havana, Cuba Santiago, Chile
Exhibition. Festival de Ia pieza corta
Brisas del Mar, Havana, Cuba
5

34
3 Diamela Eltit 8 Jaime Davidovich
Zonas de dolor (Zones of Pain, 1979-1980) The Live! Shaw begins (1979-1984)
Brothel and vicinity, Maipu Street Presented on Manhattan Cable Channel J
Santiago, Chile New York City, U.S

Yeni and Nan 9Tony Labat

Nacimiento (Birth) (with Bruce Pollack)
Galerfa Ange l Boscan, Caracas, Venezuela Bruce and Tony
October 28
Leandro Soto On the variety program, The Gang Shaw
Mutante en Avenida D(Mutant at Avenue D) NBC Studios, Los Angeles, California, US
0 Avenue, Cienfuegos, Cuba
Carlos Irizarry
4 Leandro Soto Distributes leafletsthreatening to bomb an
El hombre ylas estrobas (Man and Ropes) airplane in protest of Puerto Rico's political status
Beach, Cienfuegos, Cuba H receives a six-year U.S federal prison term
for "terrorism:" serves four years
Leandro Soto San Juan, Puerto Rico
Ancestros (Ancestors)
Park, Cienfuegos, Cuba Carlos Leppe
1919-1979 La Estrella (The Star)
Maris Bustamante Galerfa CAL, Santiago, Chile
Patente de taco (Taco Patent)
Guillermo Ochoa's television talk show Geo Ripley
Televisa Studios, Mexico City, Mexico Pijaa
Video-performance
Otto Apuy 50'/i anniversary, Museum of Modern Art
Action with paint New York City, US
Ciento Gallery, Barcelona, Spain
1oRaul Zurita
5 Cildo Meireles Cicatriz en/a mejilla (Scar on the Cheek)
0 Sermao da Mantanha. Fiat Lux (The St)rmon Cover of book, Purgatario (Purgatorv)
on the Mount. Let There Be L1ght) Editorial Universitaria, Santiago, Chile
24 hours (conceived 1973)
Centro Cultural Candido Mendes, lpanema Antonio Alvarado
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Explanation of empty frames, late 1970s
Mexico
Juan Castillo
Pointing aut our Margins INTAR (International Arts Relations, Inc.)
Santiago, Chile is founded, one of the longest-running Latino
theaters producing in English in the US
6 Lotty Rosenfeld New York City, US
Initiates her Accianes de arte (Art Actions)
Santiago, Chile Claudio Perna
Lluvia, escuftural saciai(Rain, Social Sculpture)
7 Rolando Pefia Sala de Ia Fundaci6n Mendoza
The Seven Vanishing Paints Caracas, Venezue la
Cayman Gallery, New York City, US Exhibition, Once Tipas (Ele ven Guys)

35
 1980 Marco Antonio Ettedgui
Feliz Cumpleafios (Happy Birthday)
Exhibition, lndagaci6n de Ia Imagen
Galeria de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela

3 Tony Labat
Black Beans 'n Rice
San Francisco, Californ ia, US

Rolando Pefia, Carlos Zerpa,

Diego Risquez and Ruben Nunez
il
Annual Avant-Garde Festival
New York City, US

4 Carlos Leppe
Sa/a de Espera (Waiting Room)
Galeria Sur. Santiago, Chile

Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe

Theatre-bar El Cuervo opens
1 Marco Antonio Ettedgui Me ico City, Mexico
Higiene Corporal. Mens sana in Corpore Sana
(Evento lnforman (Corporal HvgiPne A Sound Tito Vasconcelos and playwright
Jose Antonio Alca raz J
Mind, A Sound Body, Informal Event)
March 8 YSin Embargo, Se Mueven
Caracas, Venezuela (And Nevertheless, They Move)
Mexico City, Mexico J
Union por Ia cultura
Dyes Mapocho river red Roberto Obregon
March 11 Rose Acci6n No. 5 Fur Elisa Oder Elisa Nimm
Outside Santiago, Chile Deine Rose (Action No. 5 For Elisa, or. Elisa
Take Your Rose)
Ana Mend ieta Caracas, Venewela J
Gunpowder piece
Summer Teowal d D'Arago
Exl1i1Jition. Art Across the Park Infiltrations
Harl emMeer, Central Park, New Yor k City, US Caracas. Veik l uela

Carlos Zerpa Yeni and Nan

Gada cual con su prop/a santo
(Each I Vitil his own Saint)
Teatro Ia Campana de Va lencia,
lfcli8'1C:a, Venezuela
Marco Antonio Ettedgui
Seven performances at Arteologia
Araya Lamp Shop, Las Mercedes
Ca racas, Venezuela
2 No Grupo
tvtontaje de momentos p/asticos "La Muerte del
Performance"(Staged Artistic Moments.
"The Death of Performance ")
Museo de Artc Modcrno, Mexico City, Mcv ico
lntegraciones en aguil (Integrations in Water)
Bicnal cle Sao Paulo, Brazil
5 Antoni eta Sosa
Conversaci6n con Agua fib/a
(Conversation vt•itli /epid ~vdttri
With HelenJ Villal(lboa.,, Alfredo del i1 :;m2co
(composer) y Hector FuPnmayor (artist)
41 DO
Galeria de /vtc N:'CIOI'31, Caraca<, VP.nezur.la

36
J
 leon Ferrari Eugenio Dittborn
Percanta, Sonorous Sculpture; Concerto Cambia de aceite IOil Change)
(performance-sound) February 4
Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo, Brazil Tarapaca Desert. Chile

6 Marta Minujin Alfred Wenemoser

La Torre de James Joyce en Pan Persona a Persona (Person to Person)
(James Joyce's Tower in Bread) March 21
Dublin, Ireland Domo Plaza Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela
Exhibition, Acciones frente a Ia Plaza
Mar~o
Poema topogratio ITopographic Poem) Yeni and Nan
Poema urbana (Urban Poem) Acci6n divisoria el espacio
Public spaces (Action Dividing Space)
Mexico City, Mexico April 18-19
Domo Plaza Bolivar. Caracas, Venezuela
1 Joaquin Mercado Exhibition, Acciones frente a Ia Plaza

I Teleinteracto I
Simultaneous video performance
Mil Vancouver. Tokyo, Vienna, New York
7 Carlos Zerpa
(with Enrique Lara and Francisco Palma)
Ceremonia con armas blancas
(Ceremony with Sharp-Edged Weapons)
April19
Pia a, Sal ade Ia Gobernaci6n, Caracas, Venewel3
Exhibition, Acciones frente a Ia plaza;

1981 Later presented at Foro de Arte

Contempora neo, Mexico City;
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Francisco
Narvaez, Porlamar, Venezue la
Exhibition, Accwnes en Margarita

8 Pedro Ter<ln
Nuhes para Colomb1~1
(Clouds for Colombia), 1980-1 981
r-..~Ja y
!ltJsco de A1 te M demo clr. tv'lcclellin
i·.leclellm, Colombia
Exh ibition, Primer Co!uquio Latinmmericano
de Arte No-Objetual;
Lat8r presented fvluseo de Bellas J\rtes
Caracas. Venezuela
Exhibition, ACC!ones frente a Ia plaza
17-1ROctober
and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo
~ranc isco Narvaez. Porlamar. Venezuela
Exhibition, Acciones en Margarita

37
 -- - - ---. ------~ ---
J-. .J...
--
.J...

2
li
II
/1
~ L =
.
. .. l ,

;
,:~
.

_,
:~ :
Pedro lenin
Fotografiando Nubes (Photographing Clouds)
May
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin
Medellin, Colombia
2Veni vNan
(a k a Jennifer Hackshaw and
Maria Luisa Gonzalez I
Symbolism on Identity
Reproduced in Franklin Furnace's Flue, Vol. 3,
l
Exhibition, Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano Issue 2, Spring 1983
de Arte No-Objetual
3 Marta Minujin
1
Diego Barboza Carlos Garde/ de Fuego (Carlos Garde! on Fire)
Poesfa de acci6n, Pro- Testa
(Action Poetry Pro- Test I
Bienal de Medellin, Colombia
l
June 19, 20, 21 4 Alfred Wenemoser
Domo Plaza Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela Ida Pingala I
Exhibition, Acciones frente a Ia Plaza Festivallnternacional de Teatro, Caracas
]
Venezue la
Marco Antonio Ettedgui (later presented 1981 Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Hospitalizaci6n par Calculo Renal ]
(Hospitalization for Kidney Stones I 5 Rossana Ago is, Wiley ludeiia, Hugo
June 20. 21, 22 Salazar del Alcazar and Armando Williams
Domo Plaza Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela Lima en un arboi(Lima in a Tree) I
Exhibition, Acciones frente a Ia Plaza Intersections of avenues Nicolas de Pierola and
Rufino Torrico, Lima, Peru
1CADA
1
1
;Ay: Sudamerica' (Dhl South America) Diego Risquez
July 12 Bolivar, Sinfonfa Tropical
Santiago, Chile (Bolivar, Tropical Symphony) 1
Orinoko. Nuevo Mundo (Orinoco, New World I
Ana Mendieta Amerika. Terra Incognita
Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) (America. Unknown Territory)
Performative films
J
July
Jaruco Park, Jaruco, Cuba Caracas. Venezuela

Antonieta Sosa Pedro Tercln

t Ypar que no? (And Why Not?) Cuerpo de Prr;mios (Body of A\' ards)
August 22 23 Salon Michelin, Ateneo Va lencia
Domo Plaza Boll ar. Caracas, Venewela Vo lencid. Venezuela
Exhibition. Acciones frcnte a Ia Plaza
4
Rolando Peiia
Petr61eo Cruda(Crudo Oil I
Summer
Caracas, Venezuela J
5" lntcrnationdl Festival of Theater

Antonieta Sosa
Situaci6n 1/amada casa
(Situation Called Home)
Museo de BellasArtes
Caracas. Venezuela

J
5
J

38 J
6 Fernando Garcia
BH/2
Miami, Florida, US

Maria Evelia Marmolejo

Actions with menstrual blood
Galerfa San Diego and Sa Iones Atenas
Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia

7 Carlos Altamirano
Trans ito suspend/do (No Through Traffic)
Galerfa Sur, Santiago, Chile

Antonio Alvarado
(in collaboration with Eduardo Perez)
Un-Realized Projects
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico,
Mexico City, Mexico

8 Alfredo Jaar
Chile 1981, Antes de Partir
(Before Leaving)
Santiago, Chile

Alfredo Jaar
Opus 1981 I Andante Descsperato
Santiago, Chile

9Tony Labat
Fight
Terminal Gym and Kezar Pavilion, San
Francisco. California. US

10 leopoldu Maier
Fuoco. Forno. Forma (Fire. Oven, FormI
Piazza San Marco. Venice. ltal

Maris Bustamante
Porno Show
Mexico City, Mexico

Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Sara-Jo Berman

found group, Poycf.is Ge ~ c:ica
San Diego, California. US

39
 1982 5 Juan Loyola
·If!~·. WI! B Chatarra (Junk Carl
Spring
Caracas. Venezuela

2 Marta Minujin
Sets fire to Margaret Thatcher figure
June
Buenos Aires, Argentina

6 Raul Zurita
Escrituras en el cie/o (Writting in the Sky)
June 2
New York City, US 1
1 No Grupo with Carlos Zerpa Papo Colo
Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot) Octopus ]
January 19 July 8- August 31
Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas San Carlos, El Museo del Barrio
Universidad Nacional de Mexico. OJ
January 21
New York City, US 1
3 Museo deArte Moderno. Mexico City Alfred Wenemoser

Maris Bustamante
lela Pingaia II
Bienal de Sao Paulo. Brazil
-l
Para quitarle a Freud Ia macho
(To Get Rid of the Macho in Freud)
Mask for the performance, Caliente-Caliente
Fernando Garcia
On the Line 1
by No Grupo vvith Carlos Zerpa Miami, Florirla
January 21
Museo de Arte Moderno. Mexico City, Mexico Ana Mendieta J
Rastros Corporales IBodv {racks)
2 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Thursday, April 8
Oxido sue1los sob1u una c·Jnu de hiuln Franklin Furnace. f~ew York City, US
(Rust. DIUJ/1/S Oil <1 Bc!tl or ice)
January 23 Grupo al Margen
Casa Alloy, Santurce. Puerto Rico Campos de luz(Fields of ligi1t )
4 !\ClOSS Cllilt
3leopoldo Maier
H·Ombrc(H O-Man) Leopoldo Maier
April-May 25HP
The Center for Inter-American Relations. ROSC. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Nev'. York City, US
Exhibition. Performance Ci cic. Lcoooldo Malt?!: Geo Ripley (with Rufino de Ming o)
Jonier Marin. Tab)' MacLennan. Rolando Pclia, Chorreras rajas sabre fonda azul
Geo RlpieJ·. Reyina vattJ! (Red Streams on a Blue Background)
Escariche. Guadalajara. Spain
I
5 4 Geo Ripley
Dust )'au Are Earth and Will Became Man Eduardo Costa
April-May Fa. hion Fiction /1/lla minated butterflies) J
The Center for lntu-American Relations. King, photographer; Shari Belafonte. model
New York City, US Published in Vogue
Exhibition, Performance Cycle Leopolda Maier, New York City, US J
Jonier Marin, Toby MacLennan. Rolando Pe1la.
Geo R1~ie}~ ReainA VAter Exit Art is founrlrrl by Papn Colo nn~
Jeanette lngberman in lower Manhattan J

40
1983
·'RGI=NTINA'S f)f.MOCr\M: 'REST0r1ED lourdes Grobet
f\FTfR RAlJL Al.FONSIN '$ RADICA Striptease (1983-1984)
PARTY HEC:lEll Photo-performance
Mexico City, Mexico

10 Papo Colo
Against the Current
Bronx River Restoration. New York City, U.S

Papo Colo
Battle Value
Monogram Products
New York City, U.S.

Jose Antonio Morales

Performance about mental patients
Exhibition of Art1stas Visuales Asociadas (AVA)
at Alliance Fran~a i se. Lima. Peru

Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Theatre cooperative, The Divas, opens
The Beach is Nice Mexico City, Mexico
13 days, Summer
Santurce. Puerto Rico Eduardo Costa
Fashion Fiction tv. 1983-1984
7 Si/uetazo (Silhouette Action) Photographed by Scavullo for Harper 's Bazaar
Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores. New York City, U.S
and Guillermo Kexel
September 21 Raul Zurita
Ill Marella de Ia Resistencia Smoke Poems
Buenos Aires. Argentina New York City skies, US

8 Marta Minujin Merian Soto and Pepon Osorio

El Partenrin deLibras I Homcnajc aIaDemocracia Pcpati,in founded
1T!JA Parthenon of Books.'Homage to Democracy)
B: u1x, Ncv: York Ci y, US
December
B u eno~ .f1ires. Argentina

9CADA
NO r
Initiated late 1983
Santiilgo. Chile

Grupo Hexagono
Atte en Ia F:lbrir:a (A rt in thP Factorr )
Havana. Culn

41
 1984
U.S. CONGRESS REBUKES PRESIDENT Alicia Vitteri
RONALD REGAN FOR !.ISING FEDERAL De Camavales y Funerales
FUNDS 1UI\1 1Nf rW.,'\RAGU/\'S HARBORS. IOf Carnivals and Funerals)
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo
,IO .• FNJ\PIJLEON OUARH. MOOERATr IS Panama City, Panama
E LCH:iJ 1-'flESIUErH UF EL SALVAOO ~
2 Sergio Zevallos and Grupo Chaclacayo
300 SlM~ BY lNDIAN ARMY DURiNG THE
Suburb/as ISuburbs)
OCCUPATION Of TIIF SIHI( GOlDEN Lima, Peru
FMPLE, AMRIT, AR.
INDir~N PRI~ · ,.'til· ISTI=fl IW.llf!A GAN!'Jill Heidi, Elizabeth, and Rolf Abderhalden
~~ A'i''i\Sil· ..,. ill 11 i ., SH'K BO !YGlJi{RDS· Mapa Teatro founded
l .i!OlA· · ~ i•l!l ;f 1-'IH.Hillt. Bogota, Colombia 1
Maria Teresa Hincapie
Ondina ]
Theater group, Acto Latino, Bogota, Colombia

Catalina Parra
1 Papo Colo
VENCEREMOS IWe Will Overcome) Common Grave 1
January Lexington, New York. US
Political march, New York City, US
3KMAN
Tito Vasconcelos Aura Jet Scale Model Flight and Paper
Mariposas y Mar/casas Bombing Over Dance Floor
(Butterflies and Oueer Things) Fire and Ice Club, Miami, Florida, US
September 1984-June 1985
Mexico City, Mexico
)
Culture Clash founded

1985
San Francisco, California. US
I
Border Art Workshop
Taller de Arte Fronterizo
is founded. originally ba sed at the Centro I'
l
Cultural de Ia Raza. Balhna Park, San Diegn,
California. US
( Hru
)f I KJtJf_-.{. ;
fllllf )C I
'\ o apan,·erl autun--, dt' att·ntad•
t·rl \ilia \kmana Maria Teresa Cano . ~· . : '·. ··:
l
l ' ll t\Hio
Eating of life-size chocolate body repl ica
Salon Atenas. Bogota, Colombia J
la Negra
\tlr w¥ ""'Ct~l . "'
lmag~naria de fusilamiento y muerte en asfalto
IImaginary o E ecuti0n and Death 1
on the Pavemen~
Intersections, Buenos Aires, Argentina
4 J
4CADA
Geo Ripley
Viuda IWidow)
Enigma
GuadalaJara, Mexico
September
Cauce, Hoy, APSI magazines
J
Santiago, Chile
J
42 J
 Antonio Martorell Yi-Yoh Robles
Mana-plaza Jumpsfrom the Juan Pablo Duarte Bridge
directed by Rosa Luisa Marquez to the Ozama River
November 9 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republ ic
Patio, Escuela de Artes Plasticas,
SanJuan, Puerto Rico Eugenio Dittborn
Begins airmail paintings
NADA Santiago, Chile
Metro Rail
Miami, Florida Liliana Maresca and Ezequiel Furguiele,
Metro, Miami, Florida, US "Grupo Haga"
Una bufanda para Ia Ciudad de Buenos Aires
s Jose Gonzalez Boa da (A Scarf for the City of Buenos Aires)
Metro Rail, Miami, Survival Kit Adriana lndik Gallery
Metro, Miami, Florida, US Buenos Aires, Argentina

NADA Manuel Montilla

Limonada for NADA (Lemonade for NADA) Espacio lngelante (In-Freezing Space)
Lowe Art Museum, Miami, Florida, US David, Panama

6 Tu nga Antoni eta Sosa

Xip6fagas capilares Del cuerpo a/ vacfo (From the Body to the Void)
(Capillary Siamese Twins) 71. Danza en un temp/a griego del siglo XX con
1985-present sonidos de Ia ciudadl£1 Raja (Dance in a Greek
Rio de Janiero, Brazil Temple of the 20th Century with Sounds of the
City, Red)
Pepon Osorio and Merian Soto Bll. Pereza/EI Negro, (Sloth, Black)
Cocinando (Cooking) 9111. Cfrculo de luz, homenaje a Armando
PS 1, New York City, US Rever6n/EI Blanco (Circle of Light, Homage to
Armando Rever6n, White)
Marta Minujin Galerfa de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela
Offers Andy Warhol corn cobs to pay off
Argentina's foreign debt 10 Nela Ocho a
The Factory and the Empire State Building, San JoJquin c'est un geote
Nel\' York City, US (Saint Jnachim is il Gesture)
Paris, France
Antonio Navia
Nubestratos(Stratus clouds)
University of Puerto Rico, Humacao, Puerto Rico

43
 1986
U.S. CONFP.ESS BEGINS INVt:STIGATIONS
OF TH[ IRftN-CONTRA SCANDAl.
WOHLD t,OUHT R\ILFS itiAT U.S. BROKE
!N1Er.l ATIDtJJ'.l! I\W Y·- ~INING
~JICt,HAC.U \'S WAHu ·
3 Teo Freytes
Initiates his actions including Mr. Art,
Blind Juror/Blind Critic, Sr. Estetica.
Blind Curator/Blind Politician/Blind Artist/Blind
Poet, and Dr. An6nimo
San Juan, Puerto Rico

4 Eugenia Vargas
The series, The Body Works
2
Mexico City, Mexico

5 Manuel Mendive
Cuadros M6viles (Moving Pictures)
First Prize. Siena/ de La Habana. Cuba

Consuela Castaneda and Humberto Castro

Penis and Vag111a
UNEAC ''Art and Sex" panel. Havana. Cuba
pre f'onnaces 1986-2006
Otto Apuy
1i1dice de rcsbalosidad 1
(Index of Slipperiness)
Mon umento Nacional. San Jose. Costa Rica
1 David Avalos
Donkey Cart
January 4
Federal Courthouse, San Diego. US I
leandro Soto with Juan luis Morales
Pogo/otti-Brecht-Siglo XX, February 22 - 23
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Havana, Cuba

2 Border Art Workshop

4 Taller de Arte Fronterizo
End of 1he Line (Final de Ia l111ea i. October
Centro Cultural de Ia Raza. San Diego; US
side. end of the border fence '-">'ll8re TiJuilna
an San Diego mr.et the PJcific Ocean

Sergio Zevallos and Grupo Chaclacayo

La Celda (Cell)
Home in Chacl acayo, P8ru

Sergio Zevallos and Grupo Chaclacayo

Uetritus. Lima
Chaclacayo, Peru

44
1987
OLIVER NORTH, JR. TEST! IES ro U.S.
CONGRfSS THAT OFFICIALS AUTHQ .!I7rn
!HESAlf. 01 I\H~1S Hl IRAN Ar 'l THF
FUN OS WERE OIVfrTfO TiJ SUPPORT Hff
NICt\RAGU/1N G(),•JTflAS IN THE ,P,A!J-
GO~JTRA' r:;r:t Nil'\!
Pflft tDENT 0 . 'l .RtA' OFCOSfflliiC .
W N~ lTE t E r. P[A ._ P ,,IE
s Carlos Rodriguez Cardenas
Yo no existo. solo mi intenci6n
(I Don't Exist. Only My Intention)
Havana, Cuba
Manongo Mujica
Burning and burying of aviolin
Third Bienal
Huanchaco Beach, TruJillo, Peru

Denise Stoklos Geo Ripley

Mary Stuart. February Man Painted in Red(Hombre pintado de raja)
La Mama ETC . New York City, US XIX Bienal de Sao Paulo. Brazil

6 Polvo de Gallina Negra 9 Maria Teresa Hincapie

Madre par un dia Parquedades (Paucities)
(Mother for a Day) Bogota, Colombia
Summer
On the morning show. Nuestro f'v·1undo Maria Teresa Hincapie
(Our World) with host Guillermo Ochoa Si esto fuera un principia del infinito
Televisa Studios (If this were a principle of the infinite)
Mexico City, Mexico 2 days
Teatro Cuba, Bogota, Colombia
Raul Quintanilla, Aparicio Arthola,
Thais Fontenelle
Action with knife and painting
ASCTC Galerfa. Managua
Exhibition. RATs

Juan Bautista Juarez in response

to Raul Quintanilla
Action with bag of sand and rope
Galerfa Xavier Kanton. Escuela Nacionol
de Art9S Vi sual~ s. ~Janagua . NicarCJgua
E··hibition. Ale gusta yusta !fJS/'1

Alfredo Jaar
A Logo For r1mcrica
Digital animation on electronic billboard
Times Square. New York City, US

Catalina Parra
US,J., Where Liberty is a Statue
Digital animation on electronic billbodrJ
Times SquJr e, New York City, US

7 Glexis Novoa with Grupo Cfvico

AI finaltodos bailan JUntos
(In the End, Everyone Dances Together)
Street and Galer[a L. Vedado. Havana. Cuba

45
 1988
PA t~,~ 747 t:XPlOOEv "ROM TlBHORI~ f Aristides Urena Ramos
1
flO~~e QVlP JlCKERBIF. SGO llAtJn, Action with installation and radio interference l
J{!l UNG zrq OP BOAflll ANO 1. 01~ Tl il Florence, Italy
: . LI.Jtll.) .
Guillermo Gomez-Pena l
Grupo Provisional Border Bruja initiated
Rack Campesina (Country Rack) Balboa Park, San Diego, California, US.
Arte Calle exhibition opening 1
Gal eria L, January 11 Jorge Eduardo Eielson
Havana, Cuba El paisaje infinita de Ia casta del Peru
(The Infinite Landscape of Costal Peru I ]
1 Rafael Montanez Ortiz: Centro Cultural de Ia Municipalidad Miraflores
2
Years of the Warrior 7960- Years of the Psyche Lima, Peru
7988, March 26-May 22
El Museo del Barrio, New York City, US
Exhibition, lnterrupci6n
1
4 Arte Galle
2 Richard A. lou
Border Daar(Puerta de Ia Frontera)
No queremas intaxicarnas
(We don't want to be intoxicated) I
May28 Grupo Provisional
U.S -M xico border. Colonia Roma and Colonia Japan
Altamira, Tijuana Union Nacional de Escritores y Artistas
de Cuba, Havana, Cuba
3 leon Ferra ri
Doves defec"ting onto dollar bills, to be sent to Carlos Rod riguez Cardenas J
President Reagan (series begun 1985) Originales faciles de adquirir
June 4-July 9 (Easy-to-acquire Originals)
Exit Art, New York City, US Havana, Cuba
)
Exhibition, The Debt
5 Maid ito Menendez
3 Ritual Art-De, featuring Juan-Si Gonzalez Ellndio I The Indian J
Rituai-Arte I Cuerpa (Art Ritual I Body), 6 Grupo Provisional
Intersection of Via blanca y 10 de octubre Very Goad Rauschenberg
Havc1na, Cuba
originally September 19B8; realized again and
Press Conference 1//ith Robert Rauschr.nberg I
for ROCI-Cuba
filmArl 1989 by Ritual ,\rt -De ~.'lu seo NacionJI de Bellas /l rte ~ . Hava na, Cuba
J
UP Tiempo! Performing &Visual Artists Jesusa Rodriguez and The Divas
of the Americas c-, Canr:ilia de amar(The Cm,n.il rf LV\.J}
November 4-December 10 ~lexica Crty, Mexico
Includes ACT UP ( IDSCoalition To Unleash
Power). Chico Alvarez & Nosotros, AI Angeloro, Tania Bruguera
i~onna Bessouet, Josely Carvalho, Hue/fa de sangre (Blood Sign, the first of the
Georoe Cisnern<;, Thr Eddie Torres Lntin Dance a; ti3t'" remake:- of Ana Mendieta's \'fork\
J
Company, Gui llermo Gomez-Peiia, Gronk, Fototeca de Cuba, Old Havana. Cuba
Roberto ,luarez. KaJOU, Marcos Kurtycz. EYhibitio!l, Nopar mucha madrugar
Willy "Ninja" Leake, Marcelo Llorens,
Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), Alonso Mateo
James Luna, Manuel Alum Dance Company, El Eca de Umberto (Umberta Ecu Is
Marisela Norte, Nuy01 ican Poets' Cafe Fototeca de CuiJa J
Revisited, Orquesta Broadway, Catalina Parra, Havana, Cuba
Jonas dos Santos, El Salvador Media Project,
Manny Vega, and Donald Woods. Alejandro lopez l
El Museo del Barrio, in collaboration with Metaleru
Creative Timr., Ncvv York City, US Casa de Culture, PlaL<l, HavanJ, Cuba
J
46
J
 1989
FALLOFBERLI NWALL. Geo Ripley
Ancestor Painted Red
ROMANIANS OVERTHROW THEIR (El ancestro con el cuerpo pintado de raja I
COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT. Several locations, including Paris, France;
Jarash, Jordan; and London, England
rt~O OF THE COlO WAR DIMINISHEs
ATIN AMERICA'S S!GNIFICJ\NCE IN U.S.
Geo Ripley
FOREIGN POLICY.
Chroma
STUDENTS MASSACRED IN CHI ~A' S Guadalajara, Mexico
TIANANMEN SQUARE, BEIJING, WHILE
R,..llYING FOR OEMOCHACY. Yeguas de los Apocalypsis
La conquista de America
GEORGE i:WSH OBOERS INV ;SlOt· 0 (The Conquest of America)
PI.NAMA f(l CAPTIJPE Q,Jr. T!~~ : Chilean Human Rights Commission Office
nt~TATOR MAr UEI r'UR!EGfl . Santiago, Ch ile

CONHit Ti ~ EL S'iLVii.OO HET Wtf ' : i · Sergio De loot

AKMEO rDHCES AND ITS OF fl.! H5Qt.l .
MJO THE INSURGENT OF THE
P RABUt~llO MArUi NATION1\L
Ll•)fRAliON ~RUi\ll THE Ll!NfLIC 11 f.
70,000 PJlPLf DEAO. ~ OOU OISAP!'cNH
ArJtllli!W 1Nl£RN LLY DISP! AC :IJ, '~
lO,liiJ\J' 4PHA~JS .
GAHLOS AT~ORES PUU BEGii!S HI ,
s._ .ONO TERM AS Pt ESIO!.:NT L~
VENE7UHA, MARKING APEHW '1 . ~
uoPULAk rouw,'L, r·ID rr·or~f . ~
DISSAffSFAC110N. Tl ~ GOVERNM :J
· .... Y' ~-·. ,Jr r.~ ;~- ~ . . ~_,
r ' I ;· . . X.! l: ~ - .
7 Arturo Cuenca
Castillo de Ia Real Fuerza CienciJ e ldeologia
(Castle of the Rnval Force Science vs. ldeolop;·)
Apri l- May
Castillo de Ia Real Fuerza, Havana. Cuba
9
Escombros
Sutura ISutureI
In the project, The City of Art
Quarry, La Plata, Argentina
Maria Teresa Hincapie
Punta de fuga IVanishing Point I
Museo de Arte de Ia Universidad Nacional
de Colombia, Bogota
Founds Bar Bolivia, and creates satirical
fashion shows
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Lazaro Saavedra
Metamorfosis Microbrigada,
1989-1990. Final Action Censored
Havana. Cuba
9 Alonso Mateo
Hair Grows I Self-portrait
(EI pelo crece I Autorretrato)
Old Havana. Cuba
10 Todos Estrellas I All Stars
Juego de pelota IBaseball GameI
La plastica joven se dedica a/ baseball, par Ia
recreacion, Ia cultura fisica ) el deporte rICubdn
Visual Artists Dedicate Themselves to Baseball,
Tor Recrratiun, Phvsical Cultwe and Sport')
Jn<>l) Antonio Echeverria Sports Center, Veclado
University nf Havana, Cuba
Gas-Tar (Grupo de Artistas Socialistas-
Ta ller de Arte Revolucionario),
later CAPataco (Colectivo de Arte Partici pativo-
Tarifa Com[m)
A CanJir; w Chile (Vela x Chile I
Bicycles to China(Bicicletas a Ia China I
"participatory banner s" ("afiches partici pativos")
1980s
Buenos Aires, Argentina

8 Maria Teresa Hincapie

Vitrina (Shop Window)
Encuentro Latinoamericano de Arte Popular
Bogota. Colombia
Exhibition, 10 poetico cotidiano

47
 1990
i\LHt:lff(! FUJ MORI of.CO,v"FS Rene Francisco Rodriguez, organizer
Pllf:smrNl m PERl' HEt"MINJ"Jf' ' · La Cas a Nacional (The National House)
2'J 11. 11 F~FS TO APAN Wllf N Havana, Cuba
lO
Manuel Mantilla
En memoria de Halabja, ciudad de las
imagenes silenciosas (In Memorv of Halabja,
Citv of Silent Images)
David, Chiriquirf. Panama

Emilio Santisteban
Desatorador IUnclogger)
Streets of Lima, Peru

2 Marfa Teresa Hincapie

Una Cos a es Una Cosa(A Thing is a Thing)
120 minutes
XXXIII Salon Nacional de Artista,
Bogota. Colombia

Salon des Aztecas
La toma del Balmori (Taking Over the Balmori)
March
Colonia Roma. Mexicn City, MGxico
Michael Tracy
With Eloy farcisio. Ettgenia VorgJ ~. AbrJhdm
Cru7villcgas. Thomas GIJ:,sford. and
Alejandro Oiar
Sacnf!cc II. -1.1390 The Rilur Pietce
Friday, April13
San Ygnacio. Texas at the Rio Grande.
U.S -Mexican border
Astrid Hadad
Heavy Napa/ IOde to Lucht! Reves)
Mexico
I
3 Liliana Felipe &Jesusa Rodriguez
Cielo de abajo cabat et prehispanico
(The Sky Below. Prehispanic Cabaret)
Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum
Chicago, Illinois, US
4 Angel Delgado
LJ esperann es Ia Liltimo que su Dstj purdicndo
(H,Jpe '~'the Last Thing That is Driny)
Cenlru cle Desarollo cle Artes Visuales. Havamt
E\hibition ope niii~J. f1 Oujct Esuilturatiu
1The Sl'ulptual Ll!Jjecl)

1 Border Art Workshop

Taller de Arte Fronterizo
Border Sutures(Suturas cie Ia frontera). Augus
2000 miles fromBrownsville. Texas to Tijuana

Veguas del Apocalipsis

Los dos Fridas (The Two Fridas), 3 hours
Galeria Bucci, Santiago, Chile

I
18
 1991 1992
F •RMLR PAI\:t\~•l1r 1A J L.
r·•ANUF.t rwpfrct . .s CONV' r~o !'
JG CHAR ·. 1r t ... . cou•ns.

d' .

s Guillermo Gomez-Peiia
1991, A Performance Chronicle
(The Rediscovery of America by the Warrior
for Gringostroika)
October 15-19
Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn, Nevv York City, US

Nelson Rivera
In Memoriam AGI\J
November
Evanston, IL, US
Pepon Osorio and Merian Soto
Broken Hearts
Dance Theatre Workshop. New York City, and
Colorado Dance Festival. Boulder. Colorado. US
Francis Alys
The Co/lactorl1991-1992)
~' 1Pv.iUJ City, klc» r,:u
6 Felix Gonzalez-Torres
"l frlti''cd" ((ir-Go Dant i"[J I'I,J!foTII
\\·oocl, light bulbs, acryliL paint, ami go-godapr:m
in sil er lamee bi~i n i (':.hen install ed publicly)
Platform 21.5 x 72 x72 inches
7 Felix Gonzalez-Torres
"Untitled" (Welcome Back Heroes)
Bazooka bubb! ~ gum. rmhiduaiiy \Hd!Jjlt..li
in red-. ~~ h ite-. and i•!ue-c'llowd p8per
(endless supply)
Dimensions vary \'lith installation
Ideal wei(Jht 4~0 lbs
Private CoiiRction, Paris
Jimmie Durham and Maria Thereza Alves
Action in Me. ico. Uctober
Exhibition, Si Colon sup/era
(If Columbus Had Known . .I
Museo cle IVlonterrey, Montorrery, Mexico
8 Nao Bustamante
lndigurrito
Theatre Artaud. San Franci sco, California. US
Guillermo Gomez-P eiia and Coco Fusco
\u!: of •!it \Vhte B. .. r T!·. ,; U.nii.)GJV•''eil
Aru;rind.ans \·is,t :iw ~ iL:/11S12--~ :J9~ )
Edgt: '92 Festiq l, LL.: ~:inn . E!l[J; "lll.t
<:, d ivh irili, SPain
\. \'hitr'·' YM u st~l r!ll nl i'l 'u·rirJn1\rt.
r·~e' '- Yori Cit·/. ll S .
The Smithsonian ln 2titL,tinn, Naticnal Mu seum
of l~atur;1 l Histor\', \\'a:hington, DC, US,
Tl· . Austr2~i 1n I'- ius:t;!'l :;f r~aturJ I His tory
Sydnev. Austra Iia.
Field Museum. Chicago, Il linois, US.
Art Galler y, University of Caliiurria-lr·,,rie. US

Liliana Maresca
J Ouroboros
Courtyard, Universidad de Buenos Aires
School nf Philosophy nne! Litr.rntrrm
J Buenos Aires, Argentina

49
 Daniel Guzman and Luis Felipe Ortega
1993THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW
Remake (1992-1995)
Including remakes of Bruce Nauman, Bouncing
the Comer(1968). Vito Acconci, Saliva Studies
(1971), and Paul McCarthy, Black and White
Tapes(1972)
2
Mexico City, Mexico
Nao Bustamante
Rosa does Joan
On the talk show, The Joan Rivers Show
New York City, US
Si Iva no Lora
La Ruta de Hatuey(Hatuey's Route)
reprise of ca.1975 action
Sailed down the Ozama River in small canoe,
3 shot arrows at the Columbus Lighthouse
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
YORK CITY IS BOMBED.
PABLO ESCOBAR, LEADEROF THE
MEDELLiN DRUG CARTEl, I KILLED BY THE
COlOMBIAN POUCF., FOLLOWING YEARS
0 t ::,SASSINAriONS OF PUB! WOFFICII\lS
Dl DRUG CARTELS IN RE PONSE TO 1HE
t:OlOMRiAN POliCY OF i XTRJl OITINf,
DRUG TH. FFICI<LRS TO THE U.S
fH[NORT 1 ' AM•RICAN fftEf '! RAO[
AGREE\1f lJIN 1fT ll'ft!!lf:TfO
B£ ~ -IJ' Hlj: '., ~1FXIt:O. Ai~O
\NAUA
RTO Ft!Cr c;rw Wl; i:v ENG t.,il
,, W 0 HCIM lJ1NGUA&lS
I _, ur , J fEP.S HACK fONT!NUI'·
01·1\I!FA TH ,TAH S.

Maria Teresa Hincapie

Esta tierra es rm cuerpo (This Earth is my Body)
Exhibition, Ante America, Biblioteca Luis Angel 4
Arango, Bogota, Colombia
Maria Teresa Hincapie
TtJ eres santo (You are Holy)
Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia
Daniel Joseph Martinez
Museum Tags. Second Movement
(Overture con Claque -O~ertura
with Hired Members)
Altered museum admission tags

4 1 LilianaMaresca
Whi tney Museum of American Art
New York City, US
J
EVER
WANTING TO BE . WH ITE. Espacio disponible (Space Available I Exhibition, The Whitney Biennial
I. Buenos Aires, Arg8ntina 5
Elizabeth Sisco, l ouis Hock, David Avalos
1
2 Marta Chilindron and Eduardo Costa Artc Reernbolso / 1\rt ReiJatti
WMAA WMAA
Touched IJy Light July- September
Thursday May 7, 8 00 - 11 00 pm San Dieoo. r.;liifornia. US
Broadv;ay to Prince Str aet West Broadl/,d\' to 6
Houston Street. G11 Avenue to Central Park South. Border Art Workshop
5' Avenue to 8' Street, Broadi ay to Prince Taller de Arte Fronterizo I
New York City, US Border Boycott / Boicott, (1993. 1996)
San Ysidro Border Crossing, November 21 -22
5 Richard A. Lou California-Mexico border
Headlines. Voicrs frnm thr Conquered--1992
San Diego, California. US Tania Bruguera
Memoria de Ia postguerra J
3 Richard A. Lou and Robert Sanchez (Memory of the Post- War)
Los Anthropolocos Newspaper, initiated November
1992-present Havana, Cuba J
San Diego, California, US
Clemente Padin
Kunst= Kapital (Reprise of I Like America
6 and America Likes Me, Joseph Beuys, 197 4)
Museo Nacional deArtes Visuales de
Montevideo, Uruguay

50
 Liliana Maresca Evelyn Velez-Aguayo
Maresca se entrega todo destino Oh Goyal Goyal
(Maresca Offers Herself to Destiny) February 11
Photo-performance, shot by Alejandro Franklin Furnace, New York City, US
Kuropatwa and printed inerotic magazine,
El Libertino Grupo SEMEFO
Buenos Aires, Argentina Lavatio Corporis
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
Sergio De loot Mexico City, Mexico
Los Harapos de Ia Rea lite de Ia Machine
de Ia Couture (Rags of Reality from the BAdal
Machine of Couture) El Puerto Rican Passport
Centro Cultural Recoleta Including El Puerto Rican Embassy Manifesto
Buenos Aires, Argentina by Rev. Pedro Pietri
Official Passport of El Puerto Rican Embassy-
7 Raul Zurita El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico
Writing on the desert I Escritura en el desierto Initiatedat Kenkeleba House exhibition; fi rst
Atacama Desert, Chile issued to public at El Museo del Barrio, 1996
Photograph by Chilean Air Force
9 Carmel ita Tropicana
Alejandro Del Re Milk of Amnesia
Estoy tan triste (I am so sad) PS 122, New York City, US
Streetsof Santiago, Chile
Francis Alys
Magnetic Shoes
Bicnal de La Habana, Cuba

lOThe Fabulous Nobodies

1994 Yo tengo SIDA(I Have AIDS)

T-shirts
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Maris Bustamante
A Coraz6n abierto(Open Heart)
N A FT1~ performances
Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum
Chicago, Illinois, US

Eduardo Vi IIanes
Proyecto Gloria Evaporada
("Evaporated Glory" Project)
Gallery, School of Fine Arts, Unive1 si dad
NacioPal ~.1 ayo r de San MJ !C(><
Intervention, wall of Via Expressa. 19%
March toward Federal CrmgrP<;S, JII'L' 23. 1g~ ;:;
Lima, Peru

ll Freddie Mercado Velazquez

Yagrumo "La Diosa Charca "
(Yagrumo, the God of the Pool)
11 Entre viento, sol y marea
(Beween Wind, Sun, and Sea)
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico

51
 1995
1Hi O;(U\fl flMA CiTY US Ff_[)[ Ri\! Cesar Martinez
UllfJ!NC II.; 'Oll I'SfD IJY A PerforMANcena
1Ft!l1 •' ;.·; U I' H ,/1 Mexico City, Mexico
r·, A : IR Marfa Teresa Hincapie
Hacia Ia sagrado (Towards the Sacred)
Bogota, Colombia
2
Francis Alys
The Leak
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Alejandro Del Re
This is Not America Ezequiel Suarez
Oregon, U.S Cada artista que se va es un fragmento
que se pierde (Everv Artist That Leaves
Daniel Joseph Martinez Is a Fragment That Gets Lost)
How to Con a Capitalist Espacio Aglutinador, Havana, Cuba
Belfast. Ireland

l Eduardo Villanes
ldentitv Transfer

1996
Lima, PerC;

2 Nao Bustamante
America the Beautiful, 1995- 1998, 2002
Lima, Peru, Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics, organized by
Tisch School of the Arts; 1
Mardi Gras. Sydney, Australia;
Diviasiones, Madrid, Spain;
Bodv Act. Malmo. Sweden; 1
Update. Copenhaqen. Denmark;
Terre no Peligwso / Dangur Zane.
University of Californ ia, L0s i\ngc l f'~· ;
X- Teresa. Arte Alternati'!O. Meviro C;ly;
Bay Area DJnce Series, Laney Co llege. Merifm Soto
Ool:land. CA: Tctlns Aiis Muun,,s 1 .~// ~,I)' l1ead)
Fierce Tongues ltl'omen af r'ire Festi al November I
Highways, Santa ~lonica , CA; . El Museo d'"l Barrio. New York City. US
Post-Colonial California,
San Francisco State Univer, ity; GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero), Etcetera, I
1994 A Dav Witho:~t i rt. 2 ,J th ~; n L<.pusuw: with HIJOS
Escraches intiated
La Panaderia, Mexico City:
Mirror, Mirror, Califomi a Co'IPge of i\rts Buenos Aires, Argentina l
and Crafts, Oakland, CA;
Fabio Kacero
Sor Juana Festival, Mexican Fine rts Center
Museum, Chicago, Illinois; Simulated "death" (1 996- 2001) 1
Junge Hunde, Kampnagcl. Hamburg, Germany: Bueno' Aires, Argentina and New York City, US
B11nbotown. Liepzig, Germanv:
lntemational Festival of Phvsical Theatre. J
Jerusalem, Israel:
Diverse Works, Houston, Texas
1

l
 JuanJavier Salazar Miguel Calderon and Yoshua Ol<on Francis Alys
Street action A propos ito (Purposefuttv) Paradox of Praxis 1(Sometimes Making
Avenues Javier Prado and Aviaci6n, across Mexico City, Mexico Something Leads to Nothing)
fromthe Museo Nacional, Lima, Peru 9 hours
Lazaro Saavedra Mexico City, Mexico
Giuliana Migliori Caida fibre (Free Fall)
Ensavo de recuperaci6n de molecu!as de ADN Havana, Cuba 6 Francis Alys
en hematocitos de rata !(Studv of the Turista (Tourist)
Recupar~tion of DNA Hematocites of Rat!) Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante Z6ca lo, Mexico City, Mex1co
Tapedaudio-performance STUFF! 1997- 1998
Lima, Pert1 Corpus Defect/, Institute of Tania Bruguera
Contemporary Arts, London; The Burden of Guilt (1997 -1 999)
Maria Teresa Hincapie Review of Live Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; Bienal de La Habana, Cuba
Divinaproporci6n(Divine Proportion) Ex-centrics, Vordingborg, Denmark;
Second prize, X><XVI Salon Nacional de Artistas Highways, Santa Monica; Aniballopez (aka A-1 53167)
Bogota, Colombia Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts, Oregon; 1265 KM
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bional de La Habana, Cuba
Luis Alfaro Sydney, Australia;
Cuerpo Pofitizado (Politiciwlf Body) Otago Polytechnic University, Dun~din, George Emilio Sanchez and
Los ,\n~P I ,;s, California, US New Zealand; Patricia Hoffbauer
Art Space, Auckland, New Zealand; The Architecture of Seeing A Performance
Maria Elena Escalona Conscious Chronicles, The Mac, Dallas, Texas; Piece for the New Mil!enium on thP Nature
She is~ lti, jn Jnd Sh~ i'i~ v;;its 'r'ou Univer,ity of Michigan, Ann Ha bor, Michig;m; of Identity, 1997
BarcelrJ;l. , Spain The Western Front, Vancouver BC; New York City, US
The Painted Bride, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
Dixo 1 Place, Ne·:: York; Alejandro DelRe
Rhode Island School of Design; founds PerfoPuerto
Antioch University, Yellow Springs, Ohio Valparaiso, Chile

1997 Priscilla Monge

Dia sangriento (8/oodv Dav)
San Jose, Costa Rica

Carlos Amorales
3 Juan ovola Amoralus ~<: Amnra'es
Pied!·'' i -,<oFF (Paintt!d St: nes), Septr;rnh; r Interior 1~ E~ crior
Auto; ·c·,; 'it?! Este, Caracas, Venezuela fvt ; ico City, i.le\ico

4 Elena Tejada-Hererra 5 Maria Fernanda Cardoso

Ser)o, _,l ./,_· buena prescnci.J buscando tJmp!t:o Cardoso Flea Circus
(Goou j ::l:ing Woman SuAinp Emp/n jfnent) Fabric Workshop and ~.1useurn, Philadelphia,
Octot c1 ~0 Pennsylvdnia, US
Bie: ·. . - ,-':..~: ~ :c ;'c;;n~= /c.. c"iliC
Muc :_ .- ,. ·tp de Lir 1 Pc[·

53
 1998
AUGUSTO PINOCHET IS DETAINED IN Priscilla Monge
LONDON IN ORDER TO BE PROSFCIJTED Las lecciones
rORTHE [)b\THS OF SPANISH CiTIZE:NS The Lessons I1998-2000)
IlNDER THf CHILEAN DICTATORSHIP IN Three videos-performances
n':::Sh1 -JSf. THE CBILEi\N GOVERNMFNT San Jose, Costa Rica
BEG!I\!S FXTRAOITION.
Tania Bruguera
MORE THM 1 10,'100 DIE IN CWTP.At Displacement. Embodying a Nkisi Nkonde Icon
AMHliCAN HURRICANE MITCH. Havana. Cuba

fiGHfriG WORSEN~' Jr' KOSOVO. Giuliana Migliori

Sub-Lima chocolates
Lima. Peru

1 Elena Tejada-Hererra
Out of Actions: Between Performance
Recue1do (Memory)
and the Object: 1949-1979
Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences
February 8-May 10
Universiclacl Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
Museumof Contemporary Art. Los Angeles
Lima. Peru
California. US
1
Ricardo Dominguez, Carmin Karasic,
Brett Stalbaum and Stefan Wray
The Electronic Disturbance Theater(EDD
April
Internet

Guillermo Gomez-Peiia, Roberto Sifuentes,

and Sara Shelton Mann
El Mexterminator, June 9-28
El Museo del Barrio. in collaboration with
Creative Time
El Museo del Bcrrin, New York City, US

Francis Alys
The Green Line
Jerusal')lll, Israel

Teresa Margolies
Tarjetas para picar (Cards for Cutting {Cocamef)
Mexico and Colombia

54
 1999
VENEZUELAN PAESIOEI~l HUGO CHAVEZ Cecilia Vicuna Jessica Lagunas
COMES TO POWER. Cloud Net Titulo de Propiedad (Ownership Title)
World Trade Center area, New York City, US Belia de Vico Galeria, Guatemala City, Guatemala
IN HONDURAS IT IS ESTIMATED THAT
THESiATE niSAPPEARED AND TORTURED Jesusa Rodriguez Sandra Monterroso
1,361 MINORS. Photo-performance, 5 mitos nacionales segun Ave Fenix(Phoemx)
Jesusa Rodrfguez(Five National Myths Guatemala City, Guatemala
PANAMA BEGlNS SOLI: OPERATION OF According to Jesusa Rodriguez)
THEPA1
. MA CANAl
Magazine, Vice Versa 74 Maria Adela Diaz
Mexico City, Mexico Poesfa salida del pecho
Off·TARGET BOMBS Kill. ASECURilY
(Poetrv from the Bosom)
GUARO ON VJF.QUES, AN ISlAND OF
3 Freddie Mercado Velazquez Guatemala City, Guatemala
PUERTO ·UCO WWCH CONTAINS AU.S.
Reorganizando Ia casa, "Calle Luna" Exhibition, II Festival of the Historic Center
NAVY BOMBING hAr~Gt, 1RIGGtRI~IG
(Reorganizing the House, "Moon Street']
LARIH SCAlf PRtlTESTS
Old San Juan, Puerto Rico 4 Regina Jose Galindo
NATO IAUNCIL IP.ST:liKES O~J SEHBIA La vV)I agritar a/ viento (I Will Shout it to the Wind)
TO END A, TALK 1 GA!~lST t 1!1 JIC Susana Torres Post Office Building
AlflM 1ANS 1.~ ''0 OVO . Yo no me llama Juanita Guatemala City, Guatemala
(Don't call me Juanita) Exhibition, II Festival of the Historic Center
RUSSIA SF.r:ns fPOOPS TO CHI •:liNYA Lima, Peru
ASC!J ,· ':TWIt l~i_Ar~IIL. l.!it.~l~ Maria Adela Diaz
INTE. 1:1 ' Emilio Santisteban Para Ia superficie (For the Surface)
Crisis Central Park, Guatemala City, Guatemala
THtL Lima, Peru
EURG Exhibition, Emergencia artfstica Anibal Lopez (aka A-1 53167)
Stain of 55,000 Dots
2 Santiago Sierra Regina Jose Galindo Newspaper intervention, Guatemala City,
465 PaidPeople El dolor en un paiiue/o Guatemala
October (The Pain the Handkerchief)
Museo Rufino Tamayo, Sala 7 Plaza G& T, Guatemala City, Guatemala Aniballopez (aka A-1 53167)
Mexico City, Mexico PAl Group project, Sin pe!os en Ia Jengua La distancia entre dos puntas
(Distance Between Ttvo Points)
Maria Elena Gaitan Jessica Lagunas Streets. Guatemala Ci ty, Guatemala
Advenu;, c>~ of Connie Chancla The Shadmv
1998 (y . '"ission, University of Califnrnia Plaza G& T, Guatemala Cit , Guatemala 5 Border Art Workshop
Los M ~, '~ PAl Group project, Sin pc!os en Ia Jcngua Taller de Arte Fronterizo
Cesar Ci .. 'JZ Center for the lntcrdisr,ipl inary Cros:;es, Zoca!o
Study r1f , 1icanas and Chicanos Regina Jose Galindo [I; e ico City, Mexico
Los A1 J'::::s, California, US E! cielo flora tanto que de deberia ser mujer
(The Sky Weeps So Much it Should Bea Woman) James Bonachea
Francis Alys Belia de Vico Galeria, Guatemala City El artista p!astico (Plastic Artist)
Duet Guatemala Havana. Cu ba
Venice, :1 ,!y

Teresa Margolies
Bathinq ·',& Baby, 1999
Entierro, Burial). 1999
Mexic0 Cit,, Mexico

55
 2000 2 All ora &Calzadilla
Chalk, June 13, "Museum Mile, " Fifth Avenue
Exhibi tion, El Museo's Bienal The (S) Files
El Museo del Barrio, New York City, US

Francis Alys
With Rafael Ortega
Reenactment, 12 minutes, November
Mexico City, Mexico

Anibal Lopez (aka A-1 53167)

Punta en movimiento(Point in Movement)
Guatemala City, Guatemala

Anibal Lopez (aka A-1 53167)

2
Linea de 12000 puntas
(Line of 12,000 Dots)
Monterrey, Mexico

Anibal Lopez (aka A-1 53167 )

Action with charcoal in the street
Contexto, Guatemala City, Guatemala

Anibal Lopez (aka A-1 53167)

The Loan
Guatemala City, Guatemala
o' I

Colectivo Sociedad Civil 3 Teresa Margolies

El en tierra de Ia ONPE (The Burial of the Ciudad en espera (City in Hope I
National Office of Electoral Processes) Intervention on the exterior wall of
3 24 hours the Guido Fuentes Secondary School
April9 Havana, Cuba
Lirna. Peru
Roberto Jacoby
Reg ina Jose Gali ndo initiates venusPrOJP.Ct
lin/as estamos nwricnrlo (microsocictv ami currencyI
(Wt3 !\re All D, ill!/) Buu1Js i'lires. 1\rgontini!
l'·lay
National Auditorium in San Jose, Costa Rica Ta nia Bruguera j
Symposium. Central Themes Untitled IHavana 2000)
Bienal de La Habana, Cuba
I Colectivo Sociedad Civi l
Lc:\'a Ia l'.'i:u".:ra (~' 1id t.'Jr· Fl<;' Elena Tejada-Herrera
Frirlays, ~;la y z,l- Novembtr 25 TArreno de Exjleriencia II Field of Expur it,'IJLc: ,,
Pl a~a ~Aa1 or. l inn. Per1 i Lima. Peru
J
Regina Jose Galindo
Encierros IEnclosuresI
Exl1ibition. Parudh,;si,; J
4 Zool6gi co La Aurora. Guatemala Citv
Guatemal a
J
J
56
J
 Regina Jose Galindo
No perdemos nada con nacer
(We Don't Lose Anything By Being Born)
City-widefesti val, Octubre Azul
Guatemala City, Guatemala

Regina Jose Galindo

Valium 10
Museo lxchel Guatemala
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Exhibition, Vivir Aqui

Maria Adela Diaz

90 minutes with 25,000 fly larvae
Museo lx hd Guatemala
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Exhibiti01 ,, Vivir Aqui

Galeria OUPP
] La Epoca
LaEpoc3 Department Store
Havana, l' ·h~

4 GrupoEnema
Hie/a(Jr.; ), 2000
(reprisal r>i Marina. bra:novic's
The Lipo of Thomas, 1975)
lnstituto SJperior de Arte, Havana, Cuba

Grupo Enema
AmarradoJ(Tied Up)
(reprisal ci Li r: a Montano and Tehchin[j Hsieh's
The Yt.;:. c. he RontJ. I Glll-1 ~0 II
lnstitut.- ,· .• :::nr cit: Ark. H;r:ana. r;uba

Gusta•", · •iga
Rulest ..· • 3.~ .1;; 120 JU - ~0 ~11
La Lib~~·.··· ~ ;1c.na .
Exhibit!:: .. lnSf,e 2000

57
 Points East, West, and South :
Actions in New York, California, and Puerto Rico
Deborah Cullen
This essay examines the numerous important actions by
Puerto Rican artists working either in New York or on
the Island from the 1960s into the mid-1990s. As well,
it recounts the significant contributions of Chicano or
Mexican-American artists working at the same time
along the West Coast. By also acknowledging the many
Latin American artists who carried out important actions
in the United States, particularly in New York during the
1960s and early 1970s, this text focuses on the vivid
panorama of performative actions which were not only
part of a larger artistic discourse, but also often integral
and responsive gestures to the specific concerns of the
community. In many ways, the founding director of
El Museo del Barrio, the artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz,
serves as the perfect symbol of these Latino -specifically
Puerto Rican- performative artists: just as he stood in
1969 at the crossroads between influential, international
currents and his specific educational purpose vis-a-vis
his own Puerto Rican community in New York, they, too,
have been historically trapped in a paradoxical position
in which they are neither recognized and integrated as
part of the "American" panorama, nor are they fully
embraced within the Latin American scene. When and
if they receive broad, Western criticism of their work,
then they are rarely read also in terms of their cultural or
community specificity. This difficult position leads to often
missing half the meaning of their works.
Raphael Montanez Ortiz realized his first private
destructions of ritually tran sformed materials between
1959 and 1961. During this time, he also authored
the text, "Destructivism: A Manifesto" (1957-1962). 1
Coming from a background in abstract expressionist
painting and recycled, experimental film, and with an
active intellectual interest in philosophy, psychology, and
non-Western cultures advanced by his MFA studies at Pratt
Institute (completed in 1964) Montanez Ortiz created the
Archaeological Finds series between 1961 and 1967,
based in part on ritualisti c processes he had employed in
the mid-to-late 1950s to create cut-up films with a
medicine bag and hatchet. Utilizing extant, domestic
58
furniture primarily from his own home, these sacrificial
elements -intimate, worn, and auratic of the body and
personal sphere of the artist- were released from their
form and function through a private process th at
transformed both the objects as well as the artist. Th eir
remains alluded to transcendental, erotic energy, and th e
regenerative, creative, and positive practice of destruction.
These works explored the liberation from social restriction,
the ecstatic, mystical, and savage, during a period of
renewed interest in the bodily instigated by newfou nd
freedoms of expression. As well, both the method and its
remnants acknowledge Montanez Ortiz's continu ing
dialogue with the ready-modes of Marcel Ducha mp;
his work, as noted by the Berlin Dada artist, Rich ard
Huelsenbeck, was "the opposite of the machine-completed
object"2and therefore, divergent fmm the Pop art practice
championed by the likes of Andy Warhol. Rather, the
Archaeological Finds can be seen as advancing the
individual, gestural action in which Robert Rauschenberg,
in 1955, dragged his own bedclothes from his room and
painted them into pictorial space;J in the same year of
Rauschenberg's key move, on the other side of the world
in Japan, Shiraga Kazuo carried out Challenging Mud
and Murakami Sabur6 broke through paper screen s in
actions meant to express a post-Atomic angst that pushed
beyond previously normative boundaries. Monton,_;_
Ortiz's demolished bed, sofa, chairs, and yoga cush i o r,~
can be understood within th is lineage. "
Carrying out public, performative Destruction Rituo,
Realizations between 1965 and 1970, Montanez Orti L.
was a featured artist at the Destruction in Art Symposium
(DIAS), held in London in 1966. Th ere, he presented seven
public destruction events both around the town as well a
during the symposium, involving chairs, mattresses,
pianos, paper bags, and his own body. In London, Ortiz's
performances were seen by a patient of psychoanalyst
Artur Janov, and served as one catalyst for Janov's "Pri mal
Scream" theories. Montanez Ortiz became well-known for
hi s Piano Destruction Concerts, which were filmed and
televised by the BBC-TV, ABC, and WNYC. He performed
Papa Colo, Superman !i l, West Sirle Highway, Ne'.'l York l.ity, lJ S, m7
Rdphacl MontanezOrti7. Archaeological Find aZ f. I he Aftermath. New York Cit·,'. US. 1961
live on the Johnny Carson television show in 1968; this
same year, Montanez Oritz and Jean Toche co-organized
a second Destruction in Art Symposium in New York at the
Judson Gallery whe re, in October 1967, he had
participated in the series, 12 Evenings of Manipulations.'
These events, linked to the happenings enterpri sed by
Allan Kaprow and others, many of which also were
presented at the Judson Church and Gallery, involved
ritual bloodletting, audio volumes, and cathartic mice or
chicken sacrifices, such as The Death of White Henny and
Black Penny. The bountiful media coverage succinctly
elaborated the links between these contemporary artists'
works and th e ongo ing Vietnam War as well as other
tumultuous events of the late 1960s.
Arguab ly, Montanez Ortiz's greatest and most origin o
contribu ti on to the arts was yet to come. An educator
at the High School of Art and Design in early 1969 ,
he crafted a sophisti ca ted proposal for a new museum,
El Museo del Barrio to serve the Puerto Rican and Latin o
constitu encies of New York, at th e request of the Board
of Education, which sim ply wanted an outl ine of
educati onal material s. By creating El Museo del Barrio ,
and participating actively in the local struggles in New
York, Montanez Orti z was not only internationa lly
recognized, but became a sig nificant commun ity-ba sed
artist within the emergent Nuyorican scene.6 Unfortunately,
however, most local readings of thi s artist's work cannot
seem to embrace and reconcile his Dada ist, Fluxist, and
 Actionist involvements alongside his specific concerns . For
exa mpl e, this is one way in which his work has recently
been discussed in terms of its cultural connection:
Issues of the city soon came to the forefront as the
chil dren of the first wave of immigrants came of
age . Rafae l Montanez Ortiz's Mattress (1963), in
the Museum of Modern Art, is an example of this
generation's abrupt entrance on the scene. The
work consists of a sprung mattress, preserved as
an archeological object by a covering of liquid
plastic tha t freezes it in its decomposed state. It
looks like the mattresses that populated the vacant
I lots of El Barrio, announcing in technique and
image the poverty of the Latino community at the
tim e. The work of Ortiz staked a place outside the
fol kloric vision of Puerto Rican society, reflecting
th e experience of the poor throughout the city. It
revealed the potential power of a throw-away
object when viewed as a signifier of an historical
experience, nailed to the wall of a museum. '
Wh ile thi s reading offers another valid layer of allusions
to whic h the work potentially refers, unfortunately,
it reductively discards the artist's focus on the ritualistic
process in the creation of the mattress-object, thereby
tearing him from his European and Asian colleagues
and the theoretical underpinnings by which he
worked. Equa lly, the numerous Fluxus, Destructivist, and
performonce art cotologues rarely mention Montonez
Or·tiz's im po rtont role within his specific community '
Must these two read ings remain perpetually estranged?
1960s: The Magnet, New York 9
Many South American artists visiting New York during
the mid- and late 1960s brought their own perspectives
on the dissolution of the art object and a further
engagement with process. For example, Jul io Le Pmc had
exh ibited in New York as early as 1962, in a Painting
and Scul pture Acquisitions exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art. Th at same yem, his collaborative group,
GRAV 10 presen ted lnstabilite at the Madison Avenue
ven ue, The Contemporaries Gallery. While Le Pore's
objects were more concerned with optical effects and the
viewers visual relationship to the object, GRAV's
collaborative works were labyrinthine environments that
the visitor entered. GRAV members experimented with
kinetics and optics, the use of artificial light and
mechanical movement, and joined in collective activities
that considered artistic phenomenon in terms of visual,
non-emotional experience. They explored the plane of
physiological perception, examining movement and
experimenting by creating various types of interactions
or situations between the mt object and the spectator
that encouraged viewer participation. In 1964, Le Pare's
On the Move was presented at Howard Wise Gallery,
and then GRAV presented Labyrinthe 3 in early 1965 at
The Contemporaries Gallery, just as The Responsive Eye
opened at the Museum of Modern Art. The Responsive
Eye highlighted the international trend in optical and
kinetic art which Le Pare and GRAV had been
developing since at least 1960.
Just one year earlier, the broadly-reviewed 1964
exhibition at Bonino Gallery, Magnet: New York,
showcased twenty-eight Latin American artists working
in the city at the tim e. Their presence as a group was
noteworthy although they were working in various formal
strands. Like GRAV, several other Latin American artists
at this time were also experimenting in automated or
mechanical forms . Juan Downey came to New York via
Barcelona and Paris in 1965. One of his early
exhibitions, in 1966 at the Judson Gallery, focused on
interactive machines. Earlier that same year, Billy Kluver
and Robert Rauschenberg (founders of Experiments in
Art and Tech nology, or E.A.T.) had organized Nin e
Evenings.· Theatre and Engineering, which also focused
on technology and performan ce. Joaquin Mercad o
Cardona, an influential Puerto Rica n mtist and designer,
studied and worked in New York with prominent artists
and poets including Taylor Mead and Sam Shepherd.
He collaborated on Robert Rauschenberg's performance
for Nine Evenings, entitled Open Score. Although Juan
Downey would go on to distinguish himself in video and
drawing, in his 1970 Howard Wise exhibition, Pollution
Robot, he secreted himself inside an eight-foot tall
contain er on wheels, which all owed hi m to follow
audience members, viewing them through a two-way
mirror, and blow hot air on them. Downey created
happenings and performances, often highlighting the
concept of "invisible energy" as the vital force that moves
61
 our bodies and minds by using emerging technologies of
his time -video, audio, light projection, biofeedback,
and radio waves. He also invented electronic machines to
underscore the interrelationships between art, energy,
thought and the human condition . His early video-
performance, Plato Now, at The Everson Museum of Art,
in Syracuse, New York, on January 7, 1973 toyed with
the relationship between inner and public space, the
ancient symbolism of shadows thrown on a cave wall
versus the potentials (or continuities) of futuristic video
developments. Prefiguring these early experiments with
technology, Marta Minujin arrived in New York from
Buenos Aires on a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship in 1966. Aher its presentation in
Argentina, she installed The Long Shot (EI Batacazo) at
Bianchini Gallery in February 1966, which allowed
viewers to transverse a funhouse labyrinth, slide on a
female figure, and be inundated by flies swarming just
outside a Plexig las shield . Her Minuphone of 1967,
created in the U.S. in collaboration with Bell Labs,
furthered the ideas of a one-on-one media bombardment
of Simultaneity in Simultaneity (Simultaneidad en
simultaneidad, 1966, created in Buenos Aires). Her
piece-de-resistance, Minucode, held at Center for Inter-
American Relations, New York in 1969 included four
differing social parties, filmed by numerous cameras, cut
and edited, and then re-played to the assembled company
as a projection . In this work, the participants "were
rendered 'real and visible' to themselves as performers in
the social environment . . . the mass media now fostered
'environments ' that offered unprecedented immed iacy
and proximity between viewer and viewed. " rr
In 1963 Andy Warhol opened his first Factory studio at
23 1 East 47th Street. His rotating entourage during these
mid-1960s years included Latin American participants
Marisol, Joaquin Mercado, Rolando Pena, and Marta
Minujin -who, in 1985, carried out a photo-action in
wh ich she ceremoniously offered Warhol ears of corn on
the cob to pay off Argentina's foreign debt. An imagined
rock-n-roll band of Latin American men-called "The
Bananas" and said to include Manuel Pena, Rolando
Pena , and Juan Downey- had intriguing, intertextual
ties to Warholian iconography. A food-fight happening
stag ed by Venezuelan artist, Rolando Pena , known as
the The Paella-Bicycle-Totality-Crucifixion, 1967, took
place at the East Hampton home of Cuban artist Waldo
Diaz Balart and was filmed by Warhol and his crew. In
the footage, The Bananas members' names are shouted
out, although they are not all clearly visible. This footage
is included (and therefore The Bananas are said to haved
appeared) in Warhol's 25-hour movie, * * * * {Four Stars),
1967; the same footage is also used in Warhol's The
Loves of Ondine, 1968. The idea of the The Bananas is
clearly a co-optation of the fruit-as-male symbol used by
Warhol from 1964 onwards in films and t-shirts, most
famously, as a peel-off sticker on the album cover for
The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) . The exuberant
Pena, the founder of this imaginary rock band that he
composed with the names of his South America n
colleagues in New York, toyed with Warhol's puerile
symbol by re-claiming the name, adding the frisson of
foreign, tropical male sexuality. Pena arrived in New
York in 1963 to study dance with Martha Graham and
Alwin Nikolai, and later, in the Merce Cunningham ]
Dance Studio. In 1966, he participated in Timothy
Leary's and Allen Ginsberg's psychedelic show, Th e
Illumination of the Buddha, at the Second Avenue Theater J
in New York. He also organized the group, The Foundation
for the Totality, which included Balart, Downey,
and Manuel Vicentepena, among others. 12 In 1980,
1
along with his compatriots, Carlos Zerpa, Diego Risquez
and Ruben Nunez, Pena participated in the 1980
]
Annual Avant-Garde Festival in New York. Pena became
well-known for his per·formative installation works th at
explore the mean ings and rhetoric of petroleum oil .
Through street happen ing s th at he staged whi le wearin g
all black clothing and due to his obsessi ve use of oil as
a medium, Pena earned th e nickname "Principe Negro/'
or, The Black Prince.
Other Latin American visi tors to New York in this time also
pc:rrticipated in large-scale even ts . The Frenc h artist,
Arman, who had founded the Artist Key Club organized
the Locker Lottery, a participatory happening in New
York 's Grand Central Station, in 1965, with Robert Filliou
and Daniel Spoerri. In thi s action , they asked various
artists to contribute objects or multiples that were
randomly placed in lockers. Keys were raffled off at the
Hotel Chelsea, and each participant (either artists or
collectors) got the contents of the locker that their key
opened. The Grand Central Station action included works
J
J
 by the organizers as well as Ayo/ George Brecht/ Christo/
Willi am Copely1 Allan Kaprowl Roy Lichtenstein/ Claes
Oldenburg/ Dieter Roth/ Niki de Saint Phalle and Andy
Warhol. Alberto Greco/ who had arrived to New York STREET WORKS
from Buenos Aires at the very end of 1964 contributed
1

an action entitled/ Rifa Vivo-Dito to the 1965 evenfs

l festivities/ just shortly before his tragic suicide on October
Saturday, M arc h 15, 1969 (24 hours )
12 1965 .13 Other Argentinean artists/ including Roberto
l
1

Jacoby and Oscar Masotta of Buenos Aires/ visited New

York a short while later/ in 1967. While in the city1 Jacoby
11 11
attended a Hippie Be-ln in Central Park on March 26 .
MA O. f! TH . 6 TH .
VITO HANNIBAL ACCON CI
To this event/ he wore a jacket on which was pinned the ARAK A W A
42f----.---.

provocative images of both Chairman Mao and Eva GR EG ORY BATTCOC K

S COT T BURTON
43 r - - - - t - - - 1

Peron/ entitled/ A Single Heart. .JAM E S LEE BYARS

44r--- l - - ---<
RO SEMAR I E C AS TORO
EO U AROO CO STA
45 t---+---J
.JOHN G ICRNO
Anoth er Arge ntine conceptualist/ who had collaborated BILL CRESTON
46--- +--- -
with Jacoby and Masotta in Buenos Aires / came to New STEPHEN K AL T E N U ACH

LE S L E VINE
47 t - - - - - t - - - l
York and carried out extremely interesting works. LUC Y L IPPARD

B E RN A DETT E MAYER 481---1--- -l

Eduardo Costa collaborated wi th many important/ New MER IDITH MONK

BEN PATTERSON
4Br---i---------j
York-based artists to carry out four versions of Street .JOHN PERR E AULT

Works. These unexpected interventions in designated MA F=l.J C RI E

MR.T.
STI=I IO ER
~0 ·· - - --

sectors of the city included Costa ls Useful Art Works ANNE WA LDMAN
5 I r - - - - f -- -j
HANNAH WEIN E R

(created with the the help of Scott Burton) in Street Works

/ held on Saturday/ March 15/ 1969. This action / wh ich
1

took place between 42nd Street and 52nd Street/ from

Madi son to Sixth Avenue / incorporated projects by
1
numerous avant-garde artists of the time. l 4 Costa s
project was carried out between 2:30 and 7:00 am. He
purch ased and replaced missing metal stree t signs.
Accordinq to the original statem ent by the artist:
The ·i; ns read E 42 Stl E 5 1 St/ E 49 St/ E 45 St/
E 44 ,' 11 and W 51 St/ and migh t be cons idered as
a discon ti nuous literary work with six lines. l'
Additionally/ he attempted to paint the subway stati on
at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue on the Flu shing Lin e,
although he was unable to fi nis h. This work can be
related to em earlier piece/ Slice of Context (Recorte de
contexto ) carried out for the Antibiennial in Cordoba/
Argentin a from October 15 to 30 1966. There / with
1
11
Roberto Jacoby/ Costa painted Various fragments of th e
city green as sort of anonymous urban textol o
Costals interest in the fragmentary language of the city
is related to another project he carried out with John
Poster for Street Works I. designed by John Perre ault,
New York City, US. March 15. 1969
Perreault that same year. A con tinu ation of the Oral
Literature inve stigation in whic h he had co ll aborated in
Buenos Aires / Costa and Perreault edited th e Tape
Poems/ whose first edition / 1969, numbered five
hundred copie s. In this work they soug ht to underscore
the difference between spoken and written language
by //publi shing // aura l works read on tape. l7 Costa /
Perreault and Hannah We iner co ntinued to exp lore
various types of contemporary di scou rses in The Fashion
Sh ow Poetry Event. Hosted by the Cen ter for IntEr·
America n Relations on January 14/ 1969/ th e arti sts
invi ted other artists to create outfits and descriptions of
th em/ in the language of advertising. Is Costa himself
had a long engagement with the modalities of fashion .
He carried out four Fashion Fictions between 1966 and
1984/ wh ich involved crea ting one of a kind / surrealistic
fashion accessories / having them photographed by

63
 Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, Green Nmv \'ork.lntcrcontinental Project of Vllate1 s En Hranment. The Eas t River and Buni no Gallery, New York City, US, 1970
celebrity photogr·aphers, and getting them printed in
high-end fashion magazines. The first, Fashion Fiction I,
1966-1968, involved ears of gold, and was created
with Juan Risuelo. It was photographed by Richard
Avedon, on models Mariano Schiano and Marisa
Berenson, and publ ished in Vogue, 1968, with quotes
by Lawrence Alloway serving as captions. Later, us ing
photographs by Hiro, these were publi shed on the 1968
cover· of Harper 's Bazaar. Fashion Fiction II, 197 4, a
row of ants bracelet, was photographed by Irvi ng Penn
for Vogue, on the model lman. This work was never
published, beca use it was considered too agg ress ive .
Fashion Fiction Ill, with laminated butterfli es, was
photographed by King on the mode l, Shari Belafonte
64
and published in Vogue in 1982. Finally, Fashion Fictio1
IV, 1983- 1984, was photographed by Scavullo fu.
Harper 's Bazaar.
While labyrinthine optical exper·iments, food figh ts, ad J
conceptual street alterations were on one end of th e
spectrum, other artists' dematerialized the art object wi th
an environmentally-concerned, post min imalist approach.
Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, who had beg un creating his
Colorations in 1968 in Venice's Grand Canal, created
Green New York: Intercontinental Proiect of Waters
Environment, in the East River in 1970. Utili zi ng
a tugboa t with a dozen barre ls of dye in con juncti on
with his simultaneou s exhibition at the Bonino Gall er-:
Rafael Ferrer, 7i''.e Leaf Piece, Leo Casiel li Gallery, New York City, US , December 4, 1968
Antagonf·,: Between Nature and Civilization, the
Argentineon Uriburu commented on the precarious state
of the word's waterways. Using a biologically harmless
fluorescent green fluid such as the one used by the Navy
to recover Jstronauts returning to Earth, the artist protested
increasi n::J "later pollution with the color closest to nature.
Meanwh ile, Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer (who had
been living in Ph iladelphia sin ce 1966) returned the
very ga!le~:es of New York to nature. In a guerilla action
that took place on December 4, 1968, his Three Leaf
Piece involved driving bags full of Pennsylvania leaves
into the ci ty with his students, and clandestinely filling
three of guilerist Leo Castelli 's spaces. I'~ Ferrer's joyou s
and unexpectedly surreal act caused a stir, as patrons
arrived to visit the galleries and had to wade through
the crunchy-sweet leaves. Word spread rapidly of the
show-stealing prank. Even Castelli himself appreciated
th e work. Ferrer noted:
Finally, I was also told that Leo remarked 'they are
very beautiful.' Years later, he and I spoke about the
work and he said that he leh them for the day and
added 'maybe I should have leh them longer. .. ' <~'
In 1969, Ferrer brought his friend and colleague from New
York, Robert Morris, to Puerto Rico to carry out a day of
actions that created an uproar.21 Prefaced by an exhibition
65
 of their environmental' scatter' works during April and May
1969, entitled, FRARMRRIREEROFIBSEATERLR {Robert
Morris, Rafael Ferrer), held at the University of Puerto Rico,
Mayaguez, the day-long events were carried out in early
September. Lucy Lippard described it:
Morris's section of the show consisted of sculpture
and a day (September 2) of unannounced events,
among them: The transplanting of a group of
subtropical trees with a lifespan of exactly twenty-
five years; placement of a circle of military helmets
around a large rock; as an air hammer dented the
rock, the helmets were removed one by one and
the names of all the countries in Latin America were
shouted out; a systematic rock-throwing event; a
dancelike action with gasoline in a tarpaulin; the
painting of brown palm-tree trunks brown; and a
near-disastrous combination of random-formal
movement by some forty people carrying huge
torches and accompanied by two dozen aerial
bombs set off by Ferrer. Some of this work related
to earlier performance pieces by Morrisn
These works reveal Ferrer's engaged and mischievous
dialogue with the American mainstream at this time, as
well as his proactive stance in creating opportunities for
his own work . However, Ferrer -like Raphael Montanez
Ortiz- was no outsider: at this time, he was also included
in the seminal post-minimalist exh ibitions Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/ Materials (Wh itney Museum of Amer·ican
Art, 1969); Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become
Form, Works-Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information
(Bern Kunsthalle, 1969); and Information (Mu seum of
Modern Art, New York, 1970).
1970s: East Coast, West Coast, & The Island
Art hi storian Rosalind Krauss has term ed certa in
processes by post-minimalist artists, including Ri chard
Serra's Splashing, "task performance." She traces thi s
development back to Marcel Duchamp, who she cred its
as the original investigator of "the procedures of
making. " In this type of work she writes, "one shares the
real time of the sculptor's concentration on his task and
one has a sense that during this time, the artist's body is
that ta sk."2J Krauss ' reading , tracing a lineage from
66
Duchamp to the 1970s was affirmed by one of Ferrer's
most potent performative works. In early 1970, Ferrer
staged Deflected Fountain, for Marcel Duchamp in the
Philadelphia Museum of Art's (PMA) outdoor foun ta in.
This project was created for an exhibition in which the
works were meant to celebrate Duchamp's relation to
the city as well as the holdings of the institution. Ferrer
chose to site his piece in the fountain outside the window
behind the Large Glass, within the Large Glass's field of
vision . His project consisted of using his body to
physically divert the fountain's water jet foro set period
of time, twice each week, for the course of the exhibition.
Ferrer has discussed how he set a non-flexible schedule
to carry out the work, and arranged to have hi s art
students fill in for him when he could not be there. 24 This
task-performance formed a sculptural interruption of the
fountain 's jet, which normally shot straight into th e air.
When Ferrer (or his students) pressed their bodies against
the jet, it bent the spray sideways in an almost uri nary
spurt. Ferrer's work was an economic reply to Marcel
Duchamp's most canon ical wo rk, itself an action of sorts:
Fountain , 1917, in which the artist selected a urinal,
turned it upside-down, signed it with the pseudonym "R.
Mutt," and submitted it to the American Society of
Independent Artists' first New York exhibition . Ferrer ]
took the existing PMA fountain and his own body (or its
surrogates) as ready-modes for deployment in his action. ]
Th e year 1970 was important for Latin American artists
in New York. Select activ ist artists ra lli ed to form t::'o J
Museo Latinoamericano during this year, in opposiri
to the Cen ter for Inter-American Relation s and its tru st, :.s,
J
whom they felt were of questionable affiliation. Alth o' ~ ::
they had noble ideas and drafted several potent lette: .
internal strife caused th eir subdivision into MovimieT ) J
por Ia lndependencia Cultural de Latino Amer;-:n
(MICLA, Movement for the Cultural Independence of Latin
America) , and the overall group's eventual loss of ener8y
and focus.~ s Both Lygi a Clark and Helio Oiticica ho.J
been in New York since 19692 Late that summer, o11e
of the mos t important exhibitions to feature the work
of numerous Latin Ame ri can artists in New York for the
first time was held at the Museum of Modern Ad.
Information, curated by Kyna ston McShine, was on vi ew
from July 2 to September 20, 1970. The exhibition wa s
concerned with demon strating the increasing , nnn-
 Jaime Davidovich as Dr Videovich, TheFirst New York City Art Parade, New York City, US, 1983
objecti ve, and conceptual quality of international art
movements. Information included works by Artur Barrio,
Rafa el f ' rrer, David Lamelas , Cildo Meireles, Marta
Minujlr , "he New York Graphic Workshop (composed
of Lui s Crm1nitzer, Jose Gu illermo Castillo, and Liliana
Porter)/ : , li Oiticica, Alejandro Puente, and Guilherme
Magah(; , ' Vaz. Ferrer's work for Information counter,
balancer! his PMA project. This time, he aligned 50 Cakes
of Ice ar uund the fountain of the MaMA's sculpture
garden. [Ji splayed standing in almost military ranks, in
a grid for.nation flanking the central square pool, this
richly allu ·ive work transformed a rigidly symmetrical,
almost Donald Judd,like anay into a melted and
ungovern, ble mess that evaporated in the summer heat.
Meanwhile, following the military coup in Chile in
1973/ Jua n Downey created a number of critically
potent works from his vantage point in the United States.
In an L . ::( , , catTied oul during a rally on the I.T.T.
headquarters in New York, on September 11, 1974,
Downey distributed what looked like a bloody lshirt,
which read Chile Yes, Military No (Chile si, junto no) .Li
Two months later, on Tuesday, November 12, 197 4,
Downey staged the live performance, Chilean Flag, on
Manhattan Cable Channel D. The artist used public
access cable to disseminate his message about his home
cou ntry to a broader U.S. public. Another Argentinean
artist who perfected the use of public access cable for
artistic means was Jaime Davidovich. Davidovich came
to New York through a grant awarded by Jorge Romero
Brest, Director, Institute Torcuato DiTella, Buenos Aires.
He pioneered his own variety,format program, which
ran for five years on the fi rst Soho cable channel, Artists
I/
Television Network. Th e Live! Show ran from 1979 to
11
1984 and was presented on Manhattan Cable Channel
J. In the persona of Dr. Videovich, Davidovich interviewed
the most avant,garde personalities of the era such as
Linda Montano, Ann Magnuson, Etic Bogosian, Laurie
67
 Anderson, Les Levine, and Robert Longo. He mocked which Cyclona pulled down the pants of an actor, and
and analysed the conventions and shorthand of bit his 'phallus,' actually a water-filled balloon. Thi s act
television, its passive consumers, and the permeating unleashed both the water as well as the conservative
way in which television infects life. Davidovich was audience, who threw eggs, set fires, and called the
presciently critical of the medium itself, as well as police. The trio also did "frozen art" pieces, in which
bitingly parodic of artists and the art world. the performative gesture involved costuming and posing
for the camera. Finally, on June 3, 1971 , the group
A~er leaving Puerto Rico and arriving in New York from presented, A Chicano Wedding: The Marriage of
a stint in the Merchant Marines, Papo Colo carried out Marfa Theresa Conchita and Chingon, held on the
an early performative action in the form of a forgery. campus of the California State University, Los Angeles.
Diploma, 1971, a perfectly-crafted Bachelor's Degree In this, Cyclona married his real-life boyfriend, in an
from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, provided the artist attempt to 'liberate' Cal State. Predictably, the reaction
with tongue-in-cheek credentials while at the same time again was violent and derogatory. Nonetheless, the
mocking the import given to that piece of paper. Colo performers were very aware of broader popular cul ture,
settled in lower Soho, where he carried out projects like referencing not Mexican cultural heroes but rather David
Walking Sculpture and Coronation, both 1976. Bowie and Andy Warhol. They were soon able to see
Walking Sculpture was an interactive work that could be their sensibilities confirmed through the immen se ly
manipulated by the public. Later, the sticks from the work successful cult film, Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1974.
were strung up as a visual"crown" for the World Trade
Center. Colo's canonical piece, Superman 51, 1977, The 1968 "blowouts, " in which Garfield High School in
consisted of running along the West Side highway with East Los Angeles played a major role, brought tog ether
fifty-one planks of lumber tied and trailing from his body, the key participants in the influential art collaboral ive,
until he collapsed in exhaustion. This project has been Asco ('Na usea '). Students at Garfield, Harry Gamboa,
read as a commentary on the unacknowledged fifty-first Jr., Patssi Valdez, Willie Herron Ill, and Gronk united
state, Puerto Rico -dragged along, clashing into the around a school publication as well as in political
others, it eventually pulls down the healthy body. solidarity. Gamboa, particularly, was an activist student
leader, who had met with Robert Kennedy and was
On the West Coast, Latino artists responded to the targeted as subversive and un-American in U.S. Senate
rapidly-changing cultural climate in various ways. By the Subcommittee hearings 29 Aher the Chicano Moratoriu n
late 1960s in East Los Angeles, the trio Gronk, Meza, of 1970, this group of burgeoning artists joined for·_ .~
and Cyclona appemed together in street actions that and became known for their avant-garde urban satire
dealt with the performance of gender. l(nowing how to which, like Cyclona's art, did not look only retrospecli v•J v
genemte a public reaction using their bodies and attire, to their Mexican heritage for imagery, but rathe r pia;·,_ !
these artists' early performances contrasted with the off current affairs, popular culture, as well as Chicann
Chicano nationalist ideology, which generally affirmed stereotypes. Asco employed Dadaistic tactics to challenge
traditional roles and family structures. For example, in the boundaries of both culture and art.
1969, Gronk (Giugi o Nicandro) wrote and directed a J
work in which Cyclona (Robert Leg orreta) starred, entitled In appropriations of the mural genre and of Christm,Js
Coca Roaches Have No Friends. With Mundo (Edmundo) posada celebrati ons normally assoc iated wi th Mexi cm
Meza, who created masks, the project was presented cultural expression, Asco proposed innovative works tho.
both in the outdoor theatre and the basketball court of updated and commented on these traditions for th ei,
Belvedere Park, in November 1969. Somehow, a local urban environment. For example, on Decembe1· 24,
paper dubiously advertised it as a play for the whole 1971 , Asco presented their first "walking mural, " Stations
family, and the artists recall the Estrada Courts housing of the Cross, amidst the last minute Christmas Ev
commun ity as the production's main audience 2a shoppers on the street. A holiday parade-cum-Vietn am
However, this racy performance included a scene in War protest highlighted the disproportionate percen tO((

68
of people of color drafted into fighting and dying in
combat. Th e group moved along Whittier Boulevard in
elaborate costume. Herron was dressed as Christ/Death
in a wh ite robe with a brightly colored sacred heart
ainted in acrylic, and with skeleton makeup. Gronk was
~ontius Pi late/Popcorn, with green bowler hat, large
beige fu r purse, and bag of unbuttered popcorn. Gamboa
was a zombie/altar boy with an animal skull headpiece.
They carried a fifteen-foot crucifix made of cardboard
boxes and pa inted in brown, orange, and gold squiggles.
Ending in front of the U.S. Marine recruiting station at
Goodrich Boulevard, they held a five minute vigil, blessed
everyth ing with fistfuls of popcorn, and left the large cross Asco, Decoy Gang War Victim, Photo by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
Los Angeles, CA, US , 1975, reprinted 2006
blocking lhe office's door.

Asco carried out Walking Mural on December 24,

1972, in response to the fact that the riots, due to the
police hand ling of the Chicano Moratorium as well as
the Vietnam War protests in 1970, permitted officials to
cancel the annual East Los Angeles Christmas parade. In
their event, Valdez, Herron, Gronk and Gamboa
return ed to W hittier Boulevard. Valdez was dressed
as the Vi rgen of Guadalupe in black, Herron embodied
a mural th at had become bored with his static
environ ment and decided to leave, and Gronk was a
green chiffon Christmas tree. Lavishly crafted costumes
Asco, Spraypaint LACMAIa k a ProJect Pie in De/Face),
presented the artists as mural figures propelled from the Photo by Harry Gamboa. Jr, Los Angeles County Museum of
walls into the teeming streets of East Los Angeles. On Art, Los Angeles, CA, US. 1972. reprinted 2006
Arizona !.;treet at Whittier Boulevard, the group returned
to carry L _: t First Supper (After a Maior Riot) on the traffic
islan d o: Oecember 24, 197 4. On this site, a mass
shooti ng :, 1d taken place during the riots of 1973 and
the area :. d been subsequently razed and rebuilt in an
effort to erose the fraught history of the place. Asco's sit-
down mro! , which borrowed iconography from Day of
the Deo j (D ia de los Muertos), effectively reclaimed
the spc E a memorial to the dead, iust like a picnic in
a grave . { The group had also intervened at various
Day of.· Cead events, showing up in costume which
critiqued ' ·..?celebration 's semi-religious or pre-Columbian
roots. Th ~ last of Asco's works in this vein occurred in
Asco. Instant Mural. Photo by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
1974. I; In stant Mural, Gronk taped Patssi Valdez East Los Angeles. CA, US, 1974, reprinted 2006
and Humberto Sandoval to a liquor store wall with many
criss-cross ing strands of low-adhesive masking tape.
This work called attention to the fragile bonds of the
unseen SJc ial order, the "hegemonically enforced yet

69
 tacit limits and exclusions of urban space and official Zoot Suit debuted on Broadway in 1978, probing Los
culture."Jo A~er several passers-by offered to help them, Angeles' Sleepy Lagoon murder and the subsequent
they simply walked away. 1943 "Zoot Suit" riots, Universal Pictures released the
movie version of Valdez's play in January 19 82 ,
Asco also became known for other types of guerrilla- featuring Edward James Olmos as the spectral and
style actions that responded to situations of institutional smooth-talking narrator, El Pachuco. Valdez, who is
discrimination, both in museums and the movie industry. broadly regarded as the fou nder of modern Chicano
During the last week of 1972, and in response to a theatre, worked with the United Farm Workers Union to
curator's comment to Gamboa that Chicanos only make create El Teatro Campesino in Delano, Californi a in
folk art or participate in gangs, Gamboa, Gronk, and 1965 . After receiving a Golden Globe nomination for
Herron "tagged" all of the Los Angeles County Museum Zoot Suit, Valdez would go on to wr ite and direct,
of Art's entrances with their graffitied names or among others, La Bomba, 1987, which told the tragic
plaqueazos, claiming the museum and its contents as a life of Chicano singer Ritchie Volens.
conceptua l work. Spraypaint LACMA (a.k .a. Project Pie
in De/Face) only lasted one day, and was immediately Felix Gonzalez-Torres lived in Puerto Rico from 1971 to
whitewashed by the institution. Asco also developed a 1979, and remained active there until 1988. A Cu ban
series of works entitled No Movies from 1973 until the 'national, he was sent by his family to live wi th relati ves
late 1970s. These included photographs of staged and stud y at the University of Puerto Rico, prior to
events, disseminated as film still s from fictive Chicano matriculation to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn , in the summer
movie productions, which foregrounded the absence of 1979. In Puerto Rico, Gonzalez-Torres carried out
of diversity on both the creative side and talent several actions of note. Two of his very early studen t
pool of mass media. Some staged images combined works revea led his conversance wi th both international
Los Angeles urban sprawl with a sci-fi or glom-rock actions as well as the specific trajectories of artists such
aesthetic tapped into earlier in Cyclona's work (such as as Rafael Ferrer. One, Wrapped (September 1978) was
Gores, 1974); others included images that speak to the later entitled Homage to Christo in print. In the second,
contestation of terri tory and the rea lity of cultura l clashes Society (aka Melting Society or Ice Activity, Novem ber
in the sprawling city (Decoy Gang War Victim, 1975). 1978) he and two colleagues laid out one ton of melti ng
A crucial part of the No Movie strategy was not only the ice in a public space. Gonzalez-Torres mentioned to a
creation of alleged film stills, but also the advertisements, newspaper reporter that ice had been used previou s!}
flyers, and even awards ceremonies in which th ey by Americ an artist Allan l(oprow in the wo rk Fluid'.
honored their colleagues' truncated an d imaginary 1967 as we ll as by the "Puerto Rican sculptor" Rafael
contributions to cinema. Such intertextual references (stills, Ferrer at the Whitney Museum of American Art, defin inq
advertisements, mailings, media notices, awards) point to such works as "process art" and "action."n Gonzalez-
an allusive body (or its void) of richly figured tales in need Ton·es's work soon become interested in the impact an(,
of an outlet, including melodramatic vehicles, science- implications of media culture, as well as the langua g
fiction fantasy, western sagas, and bloody thrillers. and tools of mass media communications, themes whi cl
"Projecting th e rea l by rejecting the reei," JJ this playful would persist in hi s mature oeuvre. On March 18, 197Y
yet critical body of work points to the desire to both Gonza lez-Torres performed TV Empty, Empty, in
create mainstream film and tel evision, as well as the the University theatre, a work th at prefigured hi s
hung er to produce images speaking to and for the enduring interests . While the artist read a text, two
diversity of contemporary Chicano commu nities. Asco 's students were connected to a television for one hour,
work, which has been described as "soc ial and immobile, observing the off-air sign al, in a project
territorial infraction "J2 offered partial spectacles which described by Gonzalez-Torres as 'Art-Process-Action -' I
urged others to take them up. It is interesting to note that n part, the artist read, " In a continua l metamorphosi s
in these very years, the Chicano commun ity was th e image is transformed, that with on attractive
beginning to interest Hol lywood. After Luis Valdez's play form, absents itse lf, repeats itself, and converts itsel f

70
into a hero, self-esteem, detergent, hamburger, and is
onverted into emptiness, emptiness .... controlled and
~adulated even as we fall into the trap ."34
That year, Puerto Rican conceptual artist, painter, and
printmaker Carlos lri_zar:y stage~ a work i~ which he also
engaged the dissemmat1on of pnnted med1a, but to a very
different end. Irizarry distributed leaflets threatening to
bomb an airplane in protest of Puerto Rico's political
status . The artist was arrested, and despite his defense of
the action as a work of conceptua l art, he received a six-
year U.S. federa l prison term for "terrorism." Irizarry
shared a gallery with another Puerto Rican provocateur,
Joaquin Mercado. One of his early San Juan actions
included the "installation" of a bull as his artwork in the
Galeria Luig i Marrozzini in 1973.
A co lleag ue of Gonzalez-Torres\ Nelson Rivera of
Faiardo, Puerto Rico, had also begun carrying out
performances across Puerto Rico, the United States, and
in Europe, since the mid-1970s. His works range
between acti ons carried out in streets, public plazas, or
shoppi ng malls to more experimental musica l and
theatrical fo rms. In a later work, presented in Evanston,
Illinois in November 1991, Rivera presented one of his
most noted works, In Memoriam A.G.M focusing on the
1978 Cerro Maravilla massacre 35 This work, which
includes the quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest
-"Th is thing of darkness I acknowledge mine"-
recognized the tragic conflict of Puerto Rico's colonial
statu s. It utilized Catholic ritua l, holy song, and the
image of both blood-drawing and defecation to refer to
proc ssE:s of the body in relation to the hope for divine
lransfo rrr otion of the "sick" body, or country.
1980s: On the Island, Eastern Shores,
and \Vest Coast
On January 23, 1982, Felix Gonzalez-Torres performed
Rust, Dreams on a Bed of Ice (Oxido: Suenos en una
coma de hielo) at Coso Aboy in Santurce, Puerto Rico.
First, Aleida Amador read her poetry Then , wearing a
bath ing suit, Gonzalez-Torres applied sun tan oil and lay
down on a bed formed by four blocks of ice, imitating
Ada m '~ pose in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel panel,
Th e r , . ~, :on . According to interviews, texis Wl"itten in
the room slated: "It is safer to have vacation in your
homeland" and "You need balls to do anything here."
A newspaper cover, celebrating the rum industry,
was taped to the floor. A promotional photograph by
Dionys Figueroa that depicted Gonzalez-Torres and
Amador smiling, eyes closed, against a printed umbrella,
had appeared three days earlier in The New Day
newspaper. The Spring-Summer 1982 issue of High
Performance magazine reproduced the artist's statement
along with this same photograph.
From April 1983 until June 1985, Gonza lez-Torres
corresponded with the Division of Visual Arts of the
Institute of Puerto Rican Culture about presenting a video-
installation-performance in the Dominican Convent,
entitled The Beach (La playa). This event never took place
under ICP auspices. However, in the summer of 1983
Gonzalez-Torres described his independent performance,
The Beach is Nice, carried out in Santurce:
For thirteen consecutive days I played my favorite
role: the tourist (an example of metaphorical
escape). The piece was performed right into the
'real' world, and in complete anonymity. No press
release, no specific props, action or text. Only
trivia. A newspaper, Artforum, a bottle of Hawaiian
Tropic suntan oil #3, a black bathing suit, and a
few Pina Coladas. I simply laid under the sun for
the duration of the performance. Once more the
perfo rmance never happened, it was forgotte n. In
the island, memory is prohibited. Greetings! v,
A similar cynicism regarding Caribbean mannerisms is
at work in the perfmmative interventions of Te6filo
Freytes, also born outside the island. Freytes, a native
of Mexico, has lived in Puerto Rico for decades and is
a critical figure within its art scene. A graphic and
multimedia artist, activist and cultural producer, Freytes
co-founded a vital alternative space in Old San Juan,
MSA (Manifiesto Sintetista Actualizado, or Updated
Synthesist Manifesto) with Yrsa Davila, Cesar Stephenberg
and Roberto Torres, which ran from 1985 to 1991 . As
a performative artist, he has authored various characters
over the years who critique particu lar art-world practices
or institutional hierarchies including iuries, iudges,
and critics. Since 1986, this cast ha s included M1·. Ail,
71
 Blind Juror, Blind Critic, Sr. Estetica, Blind Curator, Blind Both Jose Antonio Torres Martino and Nelson Rivera
Politician, Blind Artist, Blind Poet, and Dr. Anonimo. have addressed Martorell's long-time involvement with
Freytes' alter egos appear uninvited at openings and other avant-garde theatrical and performative productions and
cultural events, to the discomfort of the officials involved. th e repercussions of his complex body of work .4o
In character, his acerbic wit calls attention to national
favorites or national self-hatred, conflicts of interest, and Also in 1985, another Puerto Rican innovator, Anton io
other foibles normally involving art and commerce. Novia, carried out a happening Stratus Clouds, at th e
University of Puerto Rico, Humacao, in collaborati on
A senior Puerto Rican artist, and beloved national figure with musicians and actors . Novia, an innovative sculptor
who has been the good-natured target of Freytes' actions, and one of the founding members of the 1970s
has also presented significant performances . After progressive Puerto Rican artistic group, Frente,4J
working with various theatre groups since 1966, the produced an elegant body of primarily sculptural work
visual artist and graphics master, Antonio Martorell that arose from his scientific and esoteric studies.
presented Mon o-plaza on Novem ber 9, 1985, in the Merging the technical with a personal poetic, his works
patio of the Escuela de Artes Plasticas, San Juan. Directed responded to astronomy, industrial and electronic
by Rosa Lui sa Marquez, with whom he has maintained a design, semiotic studies, and musical compositio ns.
lengthy collaboration, this mi xed media performance was Novia 's exquisitely crafted, often mobile-like wind
created in response to the August 30, 1985 FBI raid on chimes, tinker-toy constructions, and spaceship fo rm s
over three hund red homes and business across Puerto often were activated by motion, th ereby bringing the
Rico, in which Martorell 's home in Cubuy was also work into the realm of the thea trical through its
invaded Y Mono-plaza was comprised of a performance interaction with the audience. The happening, Stratus
and th e exhibition In ventory (lnventario), that included Clouds (Nubestratus), was a logical extension of his
Jose Charron's photographs of Martorell's home (originally concern with space, sound , and dynamism.
taken as legal evidence) as well as an inventory list and
drawings of objects from the house. The performative Back in the northeast, the Ma ssachu se tts Institute of
action included actors on stilts -some costumed like Technology (MIT) pr.esented Puerto Rican artist Joaq uin
military fi gures, Rambo, and Barbi e- giant printed Mercado's vi deo-perfo rmance, Teleinteracto 142 Th is
playing cards that referred to an earlier, well-known ·work, which was presented simultaneously in Vancouver,
Martorell pri nt project,.J a overs ized drawings of household Tokyo, Vienna, and New York in 1980, was in th e spi rit
items (a huge toothbrush , a pillow, an enormous of Marta Minujln 's 1966 proposa l, Simultaneity in
telephone), percussive music played on domestic objects, Simultaneity. Howeve r, Mercado's work explored th"'
helmets made of colanders, flags, and marching, etc. A use of the na scent video medium as we ll as th .:
tri-fold pamphlet, with shor t statements by Martorell , potentiali ti es of th e virtual world. In New York, th e
Nelson Rivera , and Lowell Fiet was produced to Caribbean-based artist Leopolda Moler (an Arge ntin ean
accompany the event. In it, Martorell wrote: who settled in th e Dominican Republic to help found the
art sc hool, Altos de Chavon, at La Romano) crea ted a
Wh en thieves rob a home, an inventory is crea ted work at the Center for Inter-American Relations in 198 2.
by the owners with the help of the police. In this intimate piece, he cast his body, froze water in the
mold, and , once melted, served a tea made wi th th e
W hen th e police of the United States rob a home
liquid from his body's shape. Th is series, which also
in Puerto Rico, the inventory is made by friends.
in cluded th e Dom inican artist Geo Ripley, presented
This is the inven tory of my home. performative action s by ar ti sts from throughout th e
The inventory of a Puerto Rican home. Americas. In 198 2 al so, further uptown, Papo Colo
choreog raphed an action in th e courtyard of El Museo
This tim e it was my home.
del Barrio, en titled Octopus. Thi s work was composed of
Tomorrow, yours .J9 hin ged, four-by-e igh t sheets of plywood standi ng in 011

72
 Border Art Workshop I Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAW ). Border Sutures. 2000 miles fromBrownsville, TX, US toTijuana. Me. ico, August 1990
1
accordion formation, on which artists and poets created
artwork "pages ."43 In 1983 , Colo enacted Against the
Current, in which he rowed upstream, against the Bron x
River to a bridge draped with a painted parachute
target/ eye he had prepared, in order to reclaim th e
polluted river. Among many other actions, paintings, and
theatrical works, Colo him self states that his most crucial
interventions are those he carries out as a New York
curator and culture broker: in 1982, Colo co-founded the
alternative art space Exit Art wi th hi s partner, Jean ette
lngberman . He acknowledges this on-going project as a
vital pari of his oeuvre.
On the West Coa st, the 1980s were particularly dyna mic.
Several artists, includ ing David Ava los, Guillermo G6mez-
Pena, ond Richard A Lou produced crucial individual
works and also participated in one of the most significant
U.S. collaborati ve groups of the late 20th century, Th e
Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW /TAF)
founded in 1984. From its inception, BAW/TAF established
itself a an active group of artists creating soc ially and
politically conscious work addressing U.S./ Mexico border
relati ons, cultural hybridi ty, the space and idea of the
border, hu ma n rights violations in the region , and the
con dition of undocumented workers. These arti sts
"sought to express th emselves as social participants in
an active relationship to the multiple forces determining
bord er realities."4 Originally based at th e Cen tro
Cul tu 1u1 de Ia Raza, Ba lboa Park, Sa n Diego, Ca lifom ia,
its founding members include Da vid Avalos, Victor
Ochoa, Isaac Artenstein, Jude Eberhardt, Sara-Jo Berman,
Gui llermo G6mez-Pena, and Michael Schnorr. ~5
BAW / TAF has been composed of and has collaborated
with a range of artists, allowing for variou s visual
stra tegies and sh ifting project formats. The workshop
continues to exist as a coll ection of voices with multiple
strengths and vis ions . Early on, BAW/ TAF staged several
interactive-labyrinthine installations meant to reflect upon
Border Realities. A noted early work of October 12, 1986
(Columbus Day) , typical of BAW / TAF 's approach, is End
of the Line. In this site-spec ific action, which was held al
th e end of the border fence where Playas de Tijua na and
th e San Diego Border Field State Park meet at the Pacific
Ocean, participant dressed as border stereotypes,
wearing oversized costumes and pro ps. Mi rrors were
broken , tables we re litemlly turned (thereby illeg ally
crossing those seated over the bo1·der), images of
Columbu s' ships were set on fire , and corn on the cob
was shared. From November 1989 to February 1990,
the BAW / TAF also staged a number of interventions i11
a sort of no-man 's-land where families and ch ildren
gathered to gossip and play between Tij uana and the
U S. , at the Soccer Fie ld/Canyon Zapata. Border
Sutures, carried out in August 1990, was a 2, 000 mile
performance-j ourn ey from Brownsvi lle, Texas to San
Diego-Tijuana , during which participants, among other
interventions, made and insta ll ed a variety of giant
staples that attempted to i1 eal the wound of th e l>orJer.
73
 The Border Boycott was held November 21-22, 1993
(and again in 1996) . In this project, the BAW /TAF
closed the San Ysidro Border Crossing, thereby calling
attention to the enormous economic stimulus this active
area fosters . While there has been some friction over
various members' versions of its history, The Border Art
Workshop has successfully drawn attention to their region
and its issues, while continually generating rigorously
critical work .
A founding member of BAW/TAF, David Avalos created
San Diego Donkey Cart in 1983, which was installed in
1986 outside the San Diego federal courthouse (where
the Immigration and Naturalization Service is located) .
The work was modeled on the fancifully decorated
Tijuana photograph carts pulled by zebra-painted
donkeys, in which tourists (normally American day-
trippers or military) pose for photographs wearing
oversized sombreros. Rather than glowing sunsets, cacti,
fleshy Indian princesses and other pre-Columbian
stereotypes, Avalos' version presented the stark image of
a dark-skinned man being frisked by an immigration
officer. When a judge ordered the cart removed ,
claiming it was a security hazard, Avalos refused. The
work was confiscated, and the media circus which
ensued ironically allowed for full public discussion of the
issues implied by the work, as well as those surrounding
its seizure. Avalos and Sushi (the sponsoring arts
organization), with the collaboration of the American
Civil Liberties Union, eventual ly got the case dism issed
in cou rt after a protracted debate, instigated by th e fact
that "Avalos perceives his role as that of an in stigator
who must continually push the limits of so-called 'private'
and 'public' spaces, and disclose the overlap between
official and suppressed reality." 46
Another active participant of the BAW/TAF, Richard A. Lou,
carried out a significant individual action that eloquently
commented on th e border condition: Border Door, of
May 28, 1988. This site specific performance/installation
occurred on the Mexico/U.S. border, one-quarter of a
mile east of the Tijuana International Airport and the
neighborhoods of Colonia Roma and Colonia Altamira
in Tijuana. A working, freestanding gold-painted door in
its frame, with one-hundred and thirty-four detachable
keys on th e Mexican side, was placed in the bmren
74
landscape at the barbed wire fence . After installi ng
Border Door, Lou returned to his neighborhood on
the Mexican side, Colonia Roma, and distributed over
two-hundred and fifty keys to people he encountered
while making his way to La Casa de Los Pobres in
Colonia Altamira . On June 17th of that year, Lou and
fellow BAW/TAF artist Guillermo G6mez-Pena presented
a radio essay entitled "Border Door" on the program
"Crossroads" on National Public Radio. Lou has continued
to carry out provocative and moving projects . In 1992,
he presented an extremely interesting on-going project
on his own shaved head, Headlines: Voices from the
Conquered-1992. He invited artists of color to propose
images for him to wear on his skin, like temporary tattoos.
Lou's bearing these images into all the aspects of his daily
life opened unexpected dialogues and interactions. Lou
also collaborates with Robert Sanchez in an ongoi ng
fictional narrative Los Anthropolocos (initiated 1992), in
which a futuristic Chicano archaeological team excavates
and examines the puzzling remains of white civilization.
This project takes various forms, and involves performative
photos and videos in which Dr. Ritchie A. Lou and Dr.
Bobby J. Sanchez unearth and interpret such confoundi ng
images as an album cover of crooner Barry Manilow, or
snapshots depicting the front-lawn aesthetics in what th ey
label, "Barrio Kinkaide. " With humor and grace, Richard
Lou continues to provoke cultural exchange.
Probably one of the most renowned alumni of th e
BAW /TAF is Guillermo G6mez-Pena. Born in Mexic)
City, G6mez-Pena moved to Los Angeles to atten '
CaiArts, and th en relocated to Son Diego in the eo+
1980s. In addition to serving as a founding member (:
BAW /TAF, G6mez-Peno co-founded the performativc
collaborative Poyes is Genetica in 1981 with Sara-Jo
Berman , which also explored th e artistic and political
tensions between the U.S. and Mexico. G6mez-Pen
becam e known for his densely written, poetical ly
Spangli sh texts, often expressed through journali st:c
outlets such as newspaper and radio, or throu gh
experimental and mixed-media publications, including the
emly border journal, The Broken Line/La Linea Ouebraclo
(established 1985) .A7 In 1988, his multiple-personae
Border Bruio, crossed the border and was born .AB Border
Bruio expressed himself through ten different characters in
four languages, in multiple international pe1·fmma11Ct.
Guillermo Gr.imez-Peiia and Coco Fusco. Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit Madrid, Spain. 1992

75
 over the course of several years. G6mez-Pena's chronicler
or shaman of border culture trades clothing, props,
gender, voices, and personalities, in a "(con)fusion of
urban signs that characterizes a barrio," as he cycles
through an eternally incomplete and ever-changing text
at each presentation.49 In this work, he continually shifts
identities to be able to speak from, and for, a variety of
positions. G6mez-Pena has received a New York Bessie
Award and a Prix de Ia Parole (both 1989) as well as a
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1991) for his original
contributions that include his numerous publications and
ongoing performance work over the last twenty years .
The Early 1990s:
A Quick Tour to the Quincentennary
In 1991-1992, G6mez-Pena collaborated wi th New
York-based Cuban artist Coco Fusco to present a series
of pivotal works around the quincentennial of
Christopher Columbus's fateful voyage to the Americas,
an historical marker to which many performance artists
felt compelled to respond. 1991 , A Performance
Chronicle (The Rediscovery of America by the Warrior
for Gringostroika) was presented as part of the Next
Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in
New York, from October 15 to 19, 1991. Fusco, playing
Queen Isabella and wearing a costume created by
Pep6n Osorio that included a Carrabelle hat, sauntered
through the intermission crowds and hawked land deeds
to the New World .so Following this, the two toured as Two
Undiscovered Amerindians Visit . . . In this landmark
work (which traveled to New York, Washington, D.C.,
Chicago, Irvine-California, London, Madrid, and
Sydney) Fusco and G6mez-Pena posed as a couple in a
cage, "Guatinauis" from the fictional land of "Guatinau",
sketched as an island east of Mexico. They wore a pastiche
of Aztec, Taino, Hawaiian, and contemporary clothing. In
character, th ey performed "traditional " tasks, such as
sewing vodun dolls, lifting weights, watching television, or
working on the computer. For a fee, they told "a uthentic"
stories in an indecipherable language, danced to rap
music, posed for polaroids, or (in New York) offered a
peek at the male's genital region. The project not on ly
critically commented on the long and shameful tradition
of exhibiting indigenous peoples, but it also forced the
public -often caug ht unawares by the duplicitous
7 /-,
museological-style presentation complete with on-
message docents and signage- to interact. Fusco has
written extensively on the range of reactions, from
nervousness, to indignation, hostility, sadness, or knowi ng
complicity.s J Diana Taylor has noted that the complex
piece already implies the spectators' failure, for no
reaction would be an appropriate one. She noted that,
for G6mez-Pena, the ideal viewer would "open the cage
and let us out."s2 This grueling and provocative work is
a watershed of contemporary performance art.
Another important West Coast artist, Nao Bustamante,
rose to national attention with early transgressive pieces
in 1992. In one, she appeared as the character of 'Rosa
the exhibitionist' on the popular daytime television talk
program, the Joan Rivers Show. She enacted a character
of confus in g sexual excess, whom the grating and
I I
repressed television doyenne used as a case study for
her guest, an author-expert on managing so-called 'ugly'
feelings. In this live intervention, the artist played wi th a
,I
Latina stereotype in order to reveal the fear aroused by
what scholar Jose Esteban Munoz has called 'brown 1
feelings' - emotions or expressiveness that polite wh ite
society would prefer contained. sJ That same year,
J
Bustamante staged the work lndigurrito at Th eatre
Artaud in San Francisco, in which she strapped a burrito
to her full , nude loins with a dildo harness, and invited
white men to come up on stage, take a bite, and absolve
themselves of five-hundred years of guilt. Alth ough J
hilarious (she utilized a vegetarian burrito so as not to
not offend), this work is effective insofar as it shifts the
normative balances through its excess of nude f!c ~h,
sexual innuendo, and submissive white men. It place, r
curvaceous Latina in a position of public authority over J
kneeling males, who volunteer to publicly simulate fellatio.
The artist's gentle and vulnerable presence in both Rosa
and lndigurrito only heightens this discomfort. Fel ix
Gonzalez-Torres "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) of
1991 employs a similar reversal of roles as Bustam a rr lf~ .
In hi s performative piece, a powder-blue and light-
rimm ed stage, set by th e artist, serves not the scopic
pleasure of the audience, but as a sanctioned arena
I
for a local male dancer. Hired for each exhibition of
the work, the dancer is invited to perform when ev r
he pleases, for five minutes at a time, for his own
gratification. Nao Bustamante has also createJ ilt·.:,
J
Elizabeth Sisco. Louis Hock. David Avalos. Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate. San Diego, CA. US . 1993
tragic and disturbingly funny, America the Beautiful,
1995-1 998. In this internationally touring proiect, she
explored grotesque behaviors while lampooning thinness,
blondnes·, feminine wiles, talent contests, and the norms
of American beauty. Bustamante has also collaborated
with Coco Fu sco on the performance Stuff, 1996-1999,
an exploration of Latin women, food and sex, as well as
expecta ti ons, desires and cultural stereotype.
Just after tb O uincentennial, in 1993, the collabo,·ative
team of c. sis Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David
Avalos ' ,- rJwarded funds to carry out a proiect from,
amon g o:; sr sources, the National Endowment for the
Arts (N EA) , o federal agency. This support came through
the Museum of Contemporary Arts, San Diego, and in
coniunctio.1with the exhibition, La Frontera/The Border.·
Art About 't e Mexico/United States Border Experience.
The arti s._ conceived a proiect in which they would
divide tlv' • :j "J nt into ten-dollar bills and distribute them
through out th e city to undocumented laborers, entitling
this work Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate. They went out to
where men line up seek ing day labor, and often invited
the media to cover the proiect. The artists signed each of
the bills and gave each worker a receipt, thereby
solemnly acknowledging the workers' contribution to the
U.S. economy. Art Rebate provoked strong and adverse
reaction s from politicians and the media . " 'This is
outrageous', U.S. Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Escondido)
said in a letter to acting NEA Chairwoman Ana M.
Steele in Washingon. 'I can scarcely imagine a more
contemptuous use of taxpayers' hard-earned dollars. If
'artists' want to hand out cash to illegal aliens, let it be
their own,' " reported one newspaper.s• A New York
Times editorial also dismissed th e work, "It's one thing to
say the Government shou ld support art with upsetting
content, and quite anothe,- to sanction the act of simply
sending taxpayers' dollars straight down the gurgler. "ss
These and other derisive remar ks highlighted the fact
that neither the laborers, nor the artists, were understood
as economic contributors or taxpayers. The artists
anticipated this reaction and expected that through the
public discourse, questions wou ld be raised as intended
by the public art event. In fact, the artists counted on the
media reaction as a component of the proiect. Avalos
stated, "We don't create these controversi es. Thr:y
already exist. In th e case of Art Rebate a state-wide trend
toward immigrant-bashing had already begun ... it wasn't
a debate because it was one-sided. These proiects are
about revealing oppositions to wha t is presented as
a consolidated political agenda."s6 Through Art Rebate,
Sisco, Hock and Avalos effectively opened up difficult
topics for discussion. Unfortunately, Art Rebate was
77
 EVER
WANTING WHITE.

WMAA WMAA WMAA

l
Daniel Joseph Martinez. Museum Tags Secund f'vlot ernent IOverture) or Overturf: con Claque- -Overture t1itli Hi1Gd Audit'nce Aicmbe1s.
The Whitney Biennial. Whitney Museum of i\rrwricarr Art. l~ew Yorl: Cit·,o. US. 1993
I
)

78
 another ch allenging project funded by the NEA that
followed on the heels of the 1990 controversy commonly
known as the "t'-JEA Four." 57 As a result, the NEA withdrew
financial support to the Museum of Contemporary Arts,
San Diego. Two years later, it would eliminate grants for
individual arti sts entirely.
On the east coast and the island of Puerto Rico, numerous
artists began presenting performative works from the mid-
to-late 1990s. These would include Freddie Mercado,
Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero, and Allora & Calzadilla,
among many, many others. 58 A canonical work of this
period, created by the Pu.erto Rican-born, New York City-
based Ad61, is the establrshment and formalrntrodudion
of El Puerto Rican Embassy/EI Spirit Republic de Puerto
Rico. Along with his "co-d irector," Reverendo Pedro
Pietri,s9 Ad61originally presented this action at Kenkeleba
House, an alternative arts space on the Lower East
Side of Hew York, in 1994. El Puerto Rican Embassy
produced E! Passport (designed by Ad61, 1994), as well
as The Spang/ish National Anthem (1993) and El Puerto
Rican Embossy Manifesto (199 4; both written by Pietri)
and appo inted the Out of Focus Ambassadors of the
Arts: ti iriom Colon (Theoter); Raul Julia (Film); Willie
Colon (Sa lsa); Piri Thomas (Literature); Miguel Algarin
(Poetry) ; Antonio Martorell (Visual Arts); and Marta
Moreno Vega (Culture). The first edition of El Passport
(numbering one-thousand lithographs) was officially
issued to th e public in 1996 at El Museo del Barrio
during a.1 exhibition of Adal's Out of Focus Nuyoricans
series . ~n Ada l's multidisciplinary project explores the
politico! ~ n d psychological condition of Puerto Ricans.
legally ,·i:i::ens of the United States, they often live as
foreig ne~·~ in this country. El Passport is a multivalent and
humoro s work. By issuing this Spanglish document,
Ad61 creates his own evidence of nationhood.
Meanwhil e, Daniel Joseph Martinez's project for the
Whitn ey Museum of American Art's 1993 Biennial in
New York became the lightening rod for the so-called
"multicultural" exhibit. Martinez redesigned the
admi ssiors buttons that the public must wear for
entrance to the museum, breaking up the words of the
phrase, "I can't imagine ever wanting to be white" and
distributing them across the museum tags that normally
state "\ ' v1AA." In this way, his pro ject, Museum Tags:
Second Movement (Overture} or Overture con Claque-
Overture with Hired Members, engaged a broad and
unwitting public as accomplices. Each wears a part of
his phrase, yet can only piece together the statement if
they become cognizant of one another and the small
buttons as a complete work of art. Martinez ruptures th e
conventions and niceties of the museum-going experience,
coercing the Whitney's public (largely white middle
class) to articulate his statement on their lapels.
Like an avant-garde cut-up poem or a dj's scratching,
the statement gains significance through this broken,
random repetition by a variety of persons wandering the
museum. Martinez's title refers to the fact that the visitors
have become the compelled promoters of this complex
statement -the claque, or paid "clappers" in antiquated
theatre audiences. As David levi Strauss has stated,
"Words and phrases in Martinez's work have significance
and power because of their strateg ic placement. This
attention to context is sculpturai."6J The artist's cunning
construction of a silent cacophony emanating from an
unutilized institutional mechanism effectively and
economically raise s complex issues of race, cultural
identity, and political power. These modest buttons, and
their mysterious first-person voice, turn the tables on the
notion that being "of color" is a less desirable position .
Martinez's complex artistic trajectory has two end urin g
strands that are both performative. His use of enunciatory,
text-based images has ranged from banners and public
wor·ks to painting s, including hi s on-going Divine Violence
series . A more recent develop ment is his use of th e
dopplegi:inger. In 2000, the artist created a series of
highly realistic photo-performances, in volving special
effects makeup and prosthetics , in which he served as
the main actor in a series with wide-rang ing references.
Some of these drew from science-fiction film genres, such
as that of director David Cronenberg's oeuvre, in which
the artist appeared to be reaching in to his body to
disembowel himself. Others alluded to we ll-known
historical photographs, such as that taken by Eddre
Adams of a Vietcong prisoner being summarily shot in
the head in the street by a Vietnamese Police Chief In
these images, Martinez appears over and over again,
with his body mutilated, bloody, and damaged. This
series of endurance performances for the camera
alludes to Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols or Ho w to
79
 Philosophize with a Hammer, in which it is proposed
that th e first thing to de-sanctify is the self. The artist
continually stages his own empathetic reposition ing into
a variety of roles, each ending in his own destruction .
This performative photographic suite led to Martinez's
experimentation with an imatronic robots that carry out
programmed actions. Cast from the artist's own body,
the first of these appeared in the exhibition, To Make A
Blind Man Murder for the Things He 's Seen, or
Happiness is Overrated, 2002 . Kneeling in a corner,
dressed in blue work clothes and holding razor blades
in each hand whi le roll ed-u p sleeves revea l existing
slashes, the robot occasionally stirs to life, slices futilely
at its wrists, and laugh. Thi s depiction of existential crisis
reveals a very private moment as a cyc le of dysfunction
in which the Daniel figure is unable to carry out its own
suicide. Call Me Ishmael, The Fully Enlightened Earth
Radiates Disaster Triumphant was Martinez's project as
the U.S. representation to the I Oth International Cairo
Biennale 2006. In this work, his second animatronic
doppelganger loses motor control. Lying on th e floor, it
erupts in a seizure or convulsion that can be likened to
a re ligious awakening. The work was based in part on
Ridley Scott's film, Blade Runner, in which an android
character is shot and spasmod ically short-circuits.
However, the title also links the work to the lead character
in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, as we ll as the lead ing
figure for all three major western religions. Here, the
context of the works' presentation allows a rea ding in
which the artist presents his flailing, Golem-like sel f as a
metaphor for epistemological and social dysfunction in
post-9 /11 society. In revealing these private and self-
threatening moments, Martinez again implicates ihe
spectator and challenges us to ta ke action. This
particularly effective performative sculpture presents
somatic-sentient disconnection in a spectacle th at allows
us to imagine the potential future direction s and
possibilities that remain for performative artists in the
twenty-first century.

J
Later excerpted and published as, "Deslruclivism: Second Manifesto," in Studio lnternotional172 , December 1966. Raphael Montanez r rtiz
has gone by several variations of his nome earlier during his career, and they ore kept as they were published at the lime in this volume.
2 Unpubl ished statement by Richard Huelsenbeck, 1965; copy in the Raphael Montanez Ortiz artist file at El Museo del Barrio .
J
3 Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955. Rau schenberg himself would shortly challenge the very meaning of such expre ssive, un ique signific 11- ~ •n
his painting s, Factum 1 ond Factum 2, 1957
J
4 See Rafael Montane z Ortiz Years of the Warrior 1960 · Years of the Psyche 1988, (N ew York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988), curoted by t c' ,!
Colon Mora les wi th text by Kristine Stiles, or Unmaking: Th e Work of Raphael Montanez Ortiz, curated and witlr o text by Roc io / .k < :
Alvarado (N ew Jersey: Jersey City Museum, 2007). Kristin e Stiles hos wrill n exten sively on Monto ii ez Orti z and deslructivism. See u!, 1 "r
Ph.D dissertation, (0/rl.S): Th Rodical Cufturol Proiecf of Event-Structured Art (Un iversity of Col iforn io, Berkeley, 1987) or her e;soy, Unw 1 · :J
Joy: lnternolionol Art Actions, ' Out of Actions: Between Performonce and the Object 1949-1979, Poul Schimmel, eel. (Los Angeles: 1V. ~ -, _ r 1
of Con temporary Art, 1998), 22 6-238. Stiles hos noted thot Monlonez Ortiz 'NOs not the onl y artist 'NOr-king on this ideo during lhrs ti : . '
Germany, the Polish artist, Gustav Metzger, wrote five manifestos belv een November 1959 and July 1964, rega rding what he termed /•_:-' :-
Destructive-Art. " Stiles ond others have also noted the related developmen t in Argentino, where, in 1961, th e exhibition "Arte Destrvcti·c
occurred at Goleria Liroloy, Buenos Aires. Shortly aher th e exhibition, this Argentine group dissolved, although their work was presented at D' 5.
For more on the Argentin ian development, see the essay on Ar gentina in th is volume, or "Posh Art and Post-Historic Art Argentino (1957 - 19c .:·,
in Mari Carmen Romire z and H e~tor O lea , ed s., In verted Utopias.· Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Hoven an J London Yale Univ-'r · >'
Press in association with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), 126- 135 .
5 12 Evenings of Manipulation ~ were pre sented from October 5 to 22, 1967, and included installati ons by Malcolm Goldstein , A! Hansen ' ·i
Forbes Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, All on Koprow, Ka te Millet, Raphoel Ortiz, Li l Picard, Steve Ro se, Carolee Schneeman n, cmd John T~; ';
film and performances by Philip Corner, Takahiko limura, Ken Jacobs, Fred Li eberman, Chorlolte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Nom June Paik, L •. s
Schmit, and Ken Worner (organized by John Hendricks) The 0/AS USA "preview" look place al Judson Gallery, on March 22, 1968, ,., 1
incl uded AI Hansen, Bici Forbes Hendricks, Jon Hendricks, Charlotte Moorman , Hermann Nitsch , Rapha el Montanez Ortiz, Nom Ju ne Pai k, ll J
Picard, and others Th symposium was cancelled in observance of Dr. Marlin Luther King's assassination an April 4, 1968. Finally, from IYia,'
10 to 18, 1968, the Destruction Art Group 1968 Presents was held al Judson Gallery, and included Bic i Forbes Hendricks, AI Hansen, CharlotiP
Moorman, Nom June Po ik, Lil Picard, Jean Tache, Jud Yalkul, and others.
6 Rafael Montanez Ortiz was an active leader of the Puerto Ri can Art Workers Coalition, among oth er organizations.
J
7 Di6genc> Bed lest r, ' Ae sthetic DP veloprnenl of Pu erto Ricon Vi suo! Arts in Nr w York as Port of th e Diosr ora The Epiloph of th e Barri:·
www.prdream .com/goleria J
80
 For example, Out of Actions does not mention or offer a footnote regarding Montanez Ortiz's key role as the founder of a New York museum.
8
It would be hard to imagi ne, for example, a discussion of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's artwork without mention of her role in founding the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
This subtitle is an homage to Carla Stellweis important text, " 'Magnet-New York~ Conceptuol, Performance, Environmental, and Installation
9
Art by Latin American Art1sts 1n New ~ark, The Laftn Amencan Sp~r~t: Art and Arftsts 1n th~ Untied States, 1920-1970, w1th essays by Lu1s R.
Cancel, Jacinto Ou1rarte, Man mar Ben1tez, Nelly Perrazo, Lowery S. S1ms, Eva Cockcroh, Fel1x Angel, and Carla Stellweg (New York: The Bronx
Museum of the Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988), 284-3 11. This article remains an important contribution to the field.
Stellweg's article title references the exh ibition, Magnet: New York (Galeria Bonino, New York, 1964) which highlighted the many Latin American
artists worki ng in New York at the time .
0 Groupe de recherche d'art visuel, or, the Visual Arts Research Group, which included core members Horacia Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Pare,
1
Franyois Morellet, Francisco Sabrina, Joel Stein, and Yvaral.
11 Alexander Alberro, "Media, Sculpture, Myth," A Principality of Its Own. 40 Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, eds. Jose Luis Falconi
and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006), 165.
12 Al an Asnen, "Foundati on for the Total tty," The East Vtllage Other (New York August 1, 1967), 5-6 Accordmg to Pena, "The Foundatton for
the Totality" included Juan Downey, Manuel Ou1nto, Jatme Barrios, Waldo Diaz Ba lart, Jose Rodriguez Soltero, Vdy Larrain, Carmen Beachart,
and others They earned out guerrilla-style happenmgs and act1ons 1n the streets
13 Interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Tuesday, November 13, 2007, New York City. I am grateful to the artists for sharing their memories
of Greco and other artists with me, thereby clarifying the Grand Central Station activity which has been vaguely cited since its mention in
Alberto Greco, Francisco Rivas, comisario (Valencia, Spain: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, 1992), 247
14 The artists who participated in the Street Works I were Vito Hannibal Acconci, Arakawa, Gregory Battcock, Scott Burton, James Lee Byars,
Rosemarie Castoro, John Giorno, Bill Creston, Stephen Kaltenbach, Les Levine, Lucy Lippard, Bernadette Mayer, Meridith Monk, Ben Patterson,
John Perreault, Mariorie Strider, Mr. T., Anne Waldman, Hannah Weiner. Street Works// occurred on April 18, between Fihh and Sixth Avenues
and 13th and 14th Streets; Street Works Ill was held on May 25 between Prince and Grand Streets and Greene and Wooster Streets; and Street
Works IV, sponsored by the Architectural League, took place in Manhattan between October 3 and 25, 1969.
15 The sig n ~ repla ced we re NE corner 42nd and Madison; 51st and Fifth; 49th and Fifth; 45th and Fifth; 44th and Fifth; and 51st and Sixth
16 Victoria Noorthoorn and Teresa Riccardi, "Chronology 1957-2007: From Destruction and Dematerialization to a Reconstruction of the Cultural
Field in Argentine Art," Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy, An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1960-2007,
guest curator Victoria Noorthoorn (New York: Americas Soc iety, 2007), 96.
17 The tapes included works by Vito Hannibal Acconci, Michael Benedikt, Scott Burton, Ted Castle, Leandro Katz, John Giorno, Joseph Ceravolo,

I Den Graham, Bernadette Mayer, Ann Waldman, lewis Warsh, and Hannah Weiner.
18 This proiect included works by James lee Byars, Enrique Castro Cid, Allan D'Arcangelo, Rubens Gerchman, Alex Katz, Nicolas Krushenick, les
Levine, Marisol, Claes Olden berg, Roberto Plate, Alfredo Rodriguez Arias, and Juan Stoppani, Jim Rosenquist, Susana Salgado (Pesce), Sylvia
Slone, Mariorie Strider, and Andy Warhol See Alexander Alberro, "Media, Sculpture, Myth," for more information.
] 19 The leaves were deposited in the elevators of the 29 West 57th Street gallery building; the front of the 4 East 77th Street townhouse gallery; and in the
three staircase landings of the 103 West 108th Street Warehouse, where the exhibition, 9 at Leo Castelli, curated by Robert Morris, was opening. Included
were: Giovanni Anselmo, Bill Bollinger, Eva Hesse, Steve Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, Alan Sorel, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and Gilberta Zorio.
20 Unoublished Jeijer,June 1988, quoted in Nina Castelli Sundell, The Turning Pain! Art and Politics in Nineteen Sixty-Eight," 20th Anniversary, Cleveland Center
fa. Contemporary Art and Lehman College of the City of New York, 1988 www.lehman.cunyedu/vpadvancc/artgallery/gallery/turning_point/ sundell.htm
21 An::;e! Crespo, "los eventos Morris en el campus de Mayog uez, " Revistas de Arte 3, December 1969.
22 L~ ·/ Lippard, Six Years. Th e Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley Universi ty of Coli forn io Press, c.1973), 115.
23 RJ,f' ind E. Krauss, "The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture," Passages in Modern Sculpture (Ca mbridge, MA and london The MIT
Press, c. 1977), 277-2 79.
24 Trar.,c ribed audiotaped interview with Rafael Ferrer, by Cyn thia Veloric, September 19, 1990; Philadelphia, PA (Washington DC Smithsonian
lrsti•ution Archives of Am erican Art), 100
J 25 Lu:s Com nitzer, "The Museo lotinoomericano and MICLA, " A Principality of Its Own, 2 16- 229.
26 Other Brazil ian artists in New York from 1969-1 970 included Iva Je Freitas, Amilcor de Castro, Rubens Gerchman, and Roberto De Lamon ica.

l 27 Downey had created other successfui T-shiri prorects e01 :i r. Wh en living in Washington DC, he had carried out Boycott Grapes from September
1Y lo 2 1, 1969. In this action, Downey created T-shirts with the symbol of the United Farm Workers. He gave the shirts to bag boys at fo.~al
superm arkets who were to wear them while refusing to corry groceries containing grapes. He also sold signed edi tions of the T-shirts during
exhibit ol Lunn Gallery to benefit Gsar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Organization of California (UFYVOC).
28 Jennifer Flores Sternad, "Cyclona and Enrly Chicano Performance Art An Interview with Robert legorrela, " GLQ (12 3, 2006), 482.
29 C. Ondine Chavoya, "Orphans of Modernism: The Performance Art of Asco," Corpus Delecti Performance Art of the Americas,
Coco Fusco, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 241. For more, recent information on Asco, see Max Benavidez, Gronk; A Ver
Series, Revisioning Art History (los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center-University of California and Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007) and Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Nori ega, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement
1
( " ' Jcles University of Californio Press, 2008 ).

81
 30 C. Ondine Chavoya, "Orphans of Modernism, " 246.
31 "Interview: Gronk and Gamboa ," Chismearte 1 (Fall 1976), 31-33.
32 David E. James, "Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of 'Avant-Garde' Film in Los Angeles," October 90 (Fall 1999), 21.
33 Lorelei Albanese, "UPR stu dents 'melt society' .. and 2,000 pounds of ice," The San Juan Star, November 4, 1978, 2.
34 Eng lish translation by the auth or. Outlines, Notebooks of Student Creation and Investigation . Magazine of the Students of the Intensive Studies
Program (Rio Piedras Campus, Dean of Studies, University of Puerto Rico, Vol. IV, No. 2, first semester, 1978-1979), 46. Originally quat d in
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Early Impressions, curated by Elvis Fuentes and orga nized by Deborah Cu llen (N ew York: El Museo del Barrio, 2006) .
Elvis Fuen tes conducted all the origina l research wh ich brought to light these early statements and student works by Gonzalez-Torres. El Museo
is appreciative of the support of The Feli x Gonzalez-Tones Foundation and Andrea Rosen Ga llery in bringing these formative and working
documents to the public attention.
35 Th e initials, A.G.M., refer to Alejand ro Gonzalez Malave, an undercover agen t. Two student independentistas were assassinated at Cerro
Maravilla, an antenna communications si te they were attempting to shut down, when their plan was disclosed by the agent who had prior
knowledge. Notably, Nelson Rivera received hi s Ph. D. in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1991 _
one of very few Puerto Rican artists that have pursued this academic fiel d. Another performative sculptor active at thi s time and deserving of
furth er atention is Melquiades Rosario Sastre.
36 Coco Fusco, Corpus Delecti, 58-59.
37 The raid targeted those suspected of an ti-U.S. sen timent, lndependentistas, or those protesting the proposed U.S. led invasion of Nicarag a.
As his last operation in Puerto Rico, COI NTELPRO speciali st Richard W. Held, Special Agent-in-Charge of the San Jua n office, led heavily-
armed FBI agents and U.S. marshals in raids across the Island. It has been reported that they kicked in doors, conducted warrant-less searches,
destroyed office and homes, impounded personal property, and arrested scores of activists. The Puerto Rican government was not notified un til
after the operation was underway. At th e pre-trial hearings, FBI ag ents admitted using illegal electronic surveillance procedures speci fically
prohibited by the Puerto Rican constitution, as well as to creating files on an astonishing 74,000 individuals .
1
38 For more information on this earl ier work, th e Juegos de mono (Parlor Games), see the en tr y by Miriam Basilio in the Graphics volume of Voces
y Visiones: Highlights from El Museo del Barrio's Permanent Collection (Ne 1 York: El Museo del Barrio, 2003), 18.
39 Originally in Spanish, translated by the author:
Cuando unos maleantes asaltan una coso el inventario lo levantan los habitantes con Ia ayuda de Ia policia.
Cuando Ia policia de los Estados Unidos asaltan una coso en Puerto Rico el inventario lo hacen los amigos.
Este es el inventari o de mi coso.
El inve ntario de una coso puertorriqueiia . J
Esta vez fue mi coso.
Manana, Ia tuya.
40 Antonia Martorell: Obra Grafica 1963- 1986, Exposicion Homenaie, lma Bienal del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe (San Juan Museo
I J
de Arte de Puerto Rico, La Coso del Libra, Institu te de Cultu ra Puertorriqueiia, 1986) and Nelson Rivera, Visual Artists and the Puerto Rican Performing
Arts, 1950-1990: The Works of Jack and Irene Delano, Antonio Martore/1, Jaime Suarez and Oscar Mestey-Villamil (New York Peter Long, 190i ).
41 The group, Frente, was formed in Puerto Rico in April 1977 by artists Luis HerncrndeL Cruz, Lope Max Dia z. Antonio ~b vi a and Paul Co mo•_: 1.
I
42 Mercado received his Moster's Degree in Visual Studies from MIT.
43 Colo recently reprised Octopus for the Nationol Gollery of the Insti tute of Puerto Ricon Culture, Convento Los Dominicos, Old Son Juan, ''·--~1
March 29 to April 29, 2007. This second version included fifty-one ortists ond poets. Originolly, the work was presented of El Mu seo d el~ :· ;
from July 8 through August 31, 1982. Participants included twenty-five visual ortists and poets, such os Vito Acco nci, David Hammons, Cor, '; -,
Parra, Reverend Pedro Pietri, Juan Sanchez, and others, including Ana Mendieta. Mend ieta is a cru ical artist who settled in New York in 1'-'72
and was a presence there until her tragic death in 1985. Although her work is touched upon in the Cuban essay in this volume, please see C\ :1 J
Viso, Ana Mendieta Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985 (Washington D.C. Th e Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gord .~ n,
Smithsonian Institution, and Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004) for in-depth informotion on Mendieta's 1 ork .
-t--i David Aval os, "A Wag Dogging a Tale, " La Frontera/The Border Art About the Mexicn/ United Stoles Border Experience, curated by Patr;,_: • J
Chavez and Madeleine Grynsztejn, coordinator Kathryn Kanjo (San Diego Centro Cultu ra l de Ia Ra za and Museum of Contemporar y N f,
1993), 67.
45 It is interesting to note that also in 1984, further up the coast in San Francisco, Culture Clash was f unded by Chicano orti sts Richard Monto;.- ·. J
Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza. Similarly addressing the situation of the Mexican-American, but through variety-style comedic performan( " -
Cul ture Clash continues to lampoon politics and society.
46 Madeleine Grynsztejn, "La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience," L F10nteta, 27.
47 Another artist whose humorous, fast-paced, and loaded use of Spanish, English and Spanglish placed him on the cultural map at the sa me time i
John Leguizamo, a Colombian-born, part-Puerto Rican actor who wrote and acted in the multi-character, Off-Broadway presentations MamLo
Mouth (1991) and Spic-0-Rama (1993). Both won numerous awards, including an Obie (Mambo Mouth ) and Drama Desk Award (Spic-0-Rama)

82
 Gui llermo G6mez-Pena has related how he often tra;els first as a new chara~ter thro~gh the Mexican border entrance into the United States as
48
0
means of birthmg them and testmg thetr characters strength. Gudlermo Gomez-Pena, Wamor for Grtngostrotka: Essays, Performance Texts,
and Poetry (St. Paul, M innesota: Graywol f Press, 1993), 29.
Robert Neustadt, "Guillermo G6mez-Peiia : Dragging Representation," Sincronia (Spring 1997).
49
C. Carr, "Rediscovering America," On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University
50
Press 1993), 197. The dress and hat worn by Coco Fusco, crea ted by Pep6n Osorio, as well as an exam ple of the land deed which she sold
as ~rt of the character, are in the Permanent Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York.
Coco Fusco, "The Other History of Intercultural Performance, " TOR, Vol . 38, No. 1 (Spring 1994), 143- 167; la ter reprinted in Coco Fusco,
51
English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York City: The New Press, 1995), 37-64.

52 Dia na Taylor, "A Savage Performance: Gu illermo G6mez-Peiia and Coco Fusco's 'The Couple in th e Cage', " TOR, Vol . 42, No. 2 (Summer
1998), 160-175.

53 Jose Esteban Munoz, "The Vul nerabi lity Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation," Women & Performance: A Journal of
Feminist Theory, VoL 16, No. 2 Wuly 2006), 191-200.
54 Seba tian Rotella, "Artists Give $10 Bills to Laborers, " The Los Angeles Times, Thursday, August 5, 1993, A3.
55 "Watch This Intellectua l Space ... " New York Times, National Edition, Sunday, August 15, 1993, Editorials, 14E.
56 Cycl vna Simonds, "Public Audit: An Interview With Elizabeth Sisco, Lou is Hock, and David Ava los," Afterimage (Summer 1994).
57 The "NEA Four" were Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes. These performance artists were recommended, through the peer
rev'ew process, to receive individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts . However, these recommendations were vetoed by
NEA Cha irman John Frohnmaye r, a presidential appointee, in June 1990. The artists challenged this ruling and won their case in court in
1993. They were awarded grants, but th e case would make its way to the United States Supreme Court. In response, the NEA, under pressure
from Congress, stopped funding individual artists.
58 Some of these have been discussed by this auth or previously. See Deborah Cullen, Here & There/Aqui y A/16: Six Artists from San Juan (New
York: El Museo del Barrio, 2001 ); Deborah Cullen, ed None of the Above: Contemporary Work by Puerto Rican Artists (Hartford: Real Art Ways
and San Juan: Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, 2004), and Poco Barragan and Deborah Cullen, No lo /lames performance/Don 't Call it
Petformance (Salamanca, Spain Fundaci6n Salamanca Ciudad de Cu ltu ra and New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2004)
59 The Rtverend Pedro Pietri was a poet, playwright and author, whose post-Vietnam war texts, including the Puerto Rican Obituary (first read at
a Y, un Lords' Rally in 1969) galvan ized the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York. He was a founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, 1973, on
th e Lower East Side, and carried out street and subway platform readings, often using interactive props and directional signs.
60 The econd lith ographic edition of 1000 was issued during Adal's dual exhibitions, Blue Bananas on Fire, at Harvard University's David
Rod efe ller Center for Latin American Studies, and Blueprints for a Nation, at the Center for Latino Arts, in 2004.
61 Do id Levi Strauss, "Between Dog & Wolf: 'To Have Been Dangerous for a Thousandth of a Second',"Belween Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and
Politics in the Twilight of the Millennium (Brooklyn: Auton omedia, 1999), 116.

83
Action Art in Argentina from 1960:
The Body (Ex)posed
Ana Longon i
"Man in action as a true work of art. "
Alberto Greco, 1963
"A weapon has been invented .
A weapon just becomes meaningful in action."
Pablo Suarez, 1968
Th ere's an anecdote that can serve as a foundational
myth for action art in Argentina: in the second half of
the 1950s, after the populist government of Juan
Domi ngo Peron was ousted, Oscar Masotta-who a
decade later would become th e lead theoreti cian of th e
avan t-garde-and two of his friends distributed cards
with the quas i-religious images of Peron and Evita, his
legendary wife who died in 1952. They did not do this
on th e street, where the name of the exiled leader cou ld
not even be mentioned, or in the factories, where a so-
called Peronist resistance operated by sabota ging th e
new regime. They chose a different setting , a hostile but
relati ve ly well-prese rved one: Bar Cotto, a privileg ed
space for sociability among intellectuals, where anti-
Peronist sentiment reigned.
Thi s showy adion by th e trio 1 -m eant as a clear
prov cotion-can also be read as "the first pi ece of
perforrncmce art in Argentina"· although it would still be
a few y .urs before thi s label became common currency
in the : rt wmld. I see it as a starting point in thi s
narrative of action art in Argentina , since it already
exhibits some of the most suggestive features of this form.
Firstly, is it action art or is it a political act? We will see
that th e unclear limits between artistic action and
poli tirci oction create a tensi on that is often explored in
other wvrks throughou t this account. Secondly, the action
was carried out in a bar, a place removed from the art
circui t. The public space became a dangerous
environ ment during a hi storical context when the
democratic system had been compromised by cons tant
military interventions . Despite being a risky terrain, th e
Marta i.. ;'1. La Destrucci6n (Dcstruction).l mpasse Ronsin. Paris. France. June 8, 1963
streets were occupied over and over again by action art,
deploying strategies that emulate guerrilla warfare, both
in its conspicuousness as in its quick retreat to a safer
place . Thirdly, provoca tion is privileged as a way to
address an audience who is involuntarily implicated in
the action. The intenti on to disturb or unsettle (something
clearly connected with the shock or alienation effect the
historic avant-gardes sought) was clearly conceptualized
by several Argentine artists3
Vivo-dito
A few years later, Alberto Greco coined the "vivo-dito"
pieces and other ways of practicing art that involved his
own body and that of others as preferred medium .4 The
ruptu re th at Greco's art affected within the art of its time
can on ly be und ers tood if seen as part of the radi cal
intellectual and artistic turn of the various avant-g arde
movements in Argentina in the long decade of the
1960s.s He was the most outstanding and controversia l
figure at the beginning of those movements, which were
marked by the appearance of informalism, and the
incorporation of ephemeral or ignob le materials and
irreverent gestures.
The collect ive break affected in thi s initial moment wa s
the exhibition , Destruction Art (Arte Destructivo), which
was held in 1961 at th e Li rolay Gallery, one of th e first
spaces th at was receptive to innovative, experimental
proposals, led by the French artist and critic Germaine
Derbecq . For one year, the group-instigated by Kenneth
Kemble,6 and wi th the participation of Lu is We lls, Silvia
Torras, En rique Barilari, Antonio Segui, Jorge Lopez
Anaya , and Jorge Roiger-collected pieces of toys,
broken umbrellas, burnt coffins, painted bathtubs, worn-
out armchairs and other kinds of urban waste from the
trash . Using th ese materials, they col lecti vely built th eir
first insta llation, occupying the entire space of the gal lery
including the ceil ing and the floor. Lit only by a dim light,
it was accompan ied by a soundtrack consistin g of a
speech played backwards (and thus impossible to
85
 .
Alberto Greco. Vivo-Oitos and Autorretrato (Self-Portrait) Vivo-Oitos. Piedra laves, Avila, Spain, 1963
understand) by the famous writer Manuel Mujica La inez.
The explicit program behind this piece-which has been
read as a "man ifesto in images"7-was destruction and
revulsion as the driving forces of art.
At the same tim e, Greco launched his vivo-dito pieces.
Created from 1962 8 onwards, in va ri ous parts of th e
world, 9 the pieces are markings on the street (usually
through circ ular chalk lines, sometimes only a hand's
gesture) and most of which are traced around people
(from a duchess to an artist friend, numbering also a
popular singer, a beggar, a street seller, and Jackie
Kennedy), and at time s surrounding objects (a cart, a
sheep's head al a market), an im als (a donkey) , cr
situations (including a worker on his way to work, or a
woman hanging clothes). Once, using a roll of paper
measuring three hundred meters by only ten centimeters
on which he had written the Second Vivo-Dito Manifesto
(Segundo Manifiesto Vivo-Dito), he completely surrounded
the town of Piedralaves, on the Castilian plateau, and
signed it as a work of art, naming it the world capital of
Living Greco-ism (Grequismo vivant).
RA
Vivo-dito pieces expand the work of art in an unprece-
I
dented way. They include everyday occurrences th at are
unrepealable, unique ephemera l moments wh ich
disappear after the artist signs them and declares them
as a work of art. In some cases, a photographer recorded
th e vivo-d ito; in many others, thei r existence is only
known through testimoni es. Vivo-dito pieces promote, in
an obvi ous way, the trans ition from work to gesture, fr, ,,
J
ob ject to action. "The artist will no longer sh ovv "':, ::
a painting but rather with his or her finger," Greco J
declared. Along the lines of conceiving of everyday lik
as the domain of art, Greco went farther in presen li n~ ]
himself, hi s life (and even his death' 'l) as works of art. 1
A Useless Language
In 1965, Jorge Bonino, an architect and unive rsi~'
professor from Cordoba, began a series of memorable
performances on the basis of the invention of "a non-
existent language that cannot be understood." He
advertised for his first performance, Bonino Clari fies
Some Doubts (Bonito aclara ciertas dudas), by pos! intJ
J
1
Kenneth Kemble, with Enrique Barilari, Jorge LopezAna\'a. Jorge Roiger.
J Antonio Segui. Si lvia Torras and Luis Alberto Wel ls. Arte Destructivo (Destruction Art I
exhibition, GJieria Lirolay, Buenos Aires. Argen tina. November 20- 30, 1961
signs wr.itten in that same incomprehensible language
around t~e city of Cordoba. He managed to attract a
I crowd of people who would li sten to him lecture, dressed
up as an academic and in front of o blackboard, with some
books and a world mop . They then wou ld take home a
"diploma" aher participating in the parody of a lesson in
which Bon ino taught "people how to speak and write." In
the middle of each performance, a child would appear on
the scene and disrupt the event. His presence interrupted
the fiction being represented.
Boni ne's immediate success took him from the lnstituto
Torcur. t-- . ,i Tello (ITDT) in Buenos Ai res to a tour of France,
Spain, t...;r.,rm nny, and Holland. Near Paris, he managed to
present his zany lesson in front of an international
gatheri ng of linguists. Using this verbal object, he would
expose the arbitrariness of any linguistic system , and the
fact that the construction of meaning derives from its usage.
t His secon d performance, Asfictions or Statements
(Asfixio 1es o enunciodos, 1968), inverts and complements
the operation of the first one. This time, Bonino spoke in
J correct Spanish with the purpose of not saying anything,
without ever formulating a coherent idea. His grammar and
vocabulary were accurate, but he managed to speak
sequenc•J with purely empty meaning. He wanted to
prevent t-'-"ople from holding on to any point of view.
Happenings and Anti-happenings
Th e artist who best embodies the popularization of the
happening in Argentina was Marta Minujin.J 2 In 1963,
in a vacant lot in Paris, she produced The Destruction
(L a deslrucci6n), wh ich she herself termed "my first
happening." In this event, she ca lled upon artists and
friends to intervene with her objects and then burn them.
In 1964, direct from the studios of TV Channel 7 in
Buenos Aires, she broadcast her happening Cavalcade
(Cabo/gala ): "Several horses paint mattresses using pail s
of paint attached to their tails while a gr-oup of athletes
burst balloons and two rock mus icians are swaddled in
adhesive tape ." !' The following year she sent out a ce1ll
for Fine Arts Event (Suceso plastico) , in a stadium in
Montevideo, Uruguay that was attended by 200 people.
In thi s happening, fiheen police motorcycles circled while
fifteen overweig ht women we re chasing th e same
number of athletes. Girls were distri bu ting kisses among
th e public. Some young people wrapped themselves up
in paper. A helicopter dropped five hu ndred live
chickens, lettuce, and talcum powder on the audience. I.;
Two more of Minujin 's ambient, circu it pieces also had
a major public impact in 1965 . They both dealt with
characters, settings, practices, and vocabularies related
to urban popular culture. The Drug on the Market (La
Menesundo) was created by Marta Minujin and Ruben
87
 Santantonin, and featured the collaboration l5 of other
artists at the ITDT. It was a cycle that eight people could
enter at a time. There, they would go through experiences
aimed at reviving their numbed senses. In the course of
these experiences (a series of TV sets with the volume
jacked up, a half-naked couple in bed , a make-up and
massage parlor, a confetti shower), the audience also
confronted their own image broadcast on a closed TV
circuit. In this way, they were also incorporated into the
work as spectators of themselves.
In The Long Shot (EI Batacazo), which at the beginning
of 1966 moved from Buenos Aires to Bianchini Gallery
in New York, the viewer wou ld climb a ladder and
encounter live rabbits, walk on a naked female figure
made from polyurethane foam (who wou ld moan under
the weight of visitors) and end up in a tunnel made from
clear acrylic into which flies would crash. This disorienting
tour wou ld exhibit the viewer to those who were in line
waiting for their turn to enter.
In 1966 there was another coup headed by General
Ongania. 16 At the same time, the press declared that year
as "the year of the avant-garde," because of the attention
in the media to the local emergence of Pop art,
Happenings, ambient pieces and objects, Minimalism,
and the beginnings of what wou ld become known as
Conceptual art. That same year the group Art of the
Media (Arte de los Medias), 17 emerged with their first
co llective piece known as the "anti-happening, "consisting
of the coverage of an event that had never occurred .
News of a playful and festive happening, entitled
Happening for a Deceased Boar (Happening para un
iabalf difunto) was disseminated through a series of
strateg ies, including a false newspaper report, truncated
pictures, fabricated testimon ies, and a variety of complicit
actions . The strategies were successful in getting extensive
media attention for the event, something that was later
exposed as a farce by the artists themselves. The goal of
this project was not to expose the deceit of the media, but
rather to suggest a much more advanced idea for its time:
the fact that the media was able to produce an event.
Through Eduardo Costa's initiative, supported by Roberto
Jacoby and Juan Risuleo, the group undertook a series of
experiments with ora l literature that challenged literary
88
conventions based on the premise tha t writing excludes
the suprasegmental properties of language. To include
these, they recorded the oral reports of a shoeshine, a
psychotic patient suffering from interpretation delirium, etc.
Thus they violated the "connection between the work and
its 'natural' medium" (i.e., literature and writing), and they
pointed to an expansion of the notion of "literary work" by
replacing the book with the cassette tape, incorporating
oral language, colloquial, or casual registers that had no
literary intentionality, by preserving these with tape
recorders. When they exhibited these materials in 1966 at
the ITDT with the title Illustrated Poems (Poemas ilustrados)
and Oral Literature (Literatura ora~, they were for the most
part rejected by critics, who did not admit that th ose
experiments wi th orality could be termed "literature. "
The Art of the Media group did not la st for more th an a
year, although some later pieces by members followed
the same path. 1e Encouraged by the thought th at "
in a country where everyone talked about happen ings
withou t having seen much, it wasn't a bad idea to create
one, " the theoretician and avant-garde animator Os or ]
Masotta 19 organized a series of activities at the
ITDT dealing with the happening as a genre and its
counterpoint -the emerging media ar1.2o Masotta did
not limit himself to exploring distinctions in his theoreti cal
writings; he also crea ted a few happenings and media 1
works. One of his happenings, To Induce the Spirit of the
Image (Para inducir of espfritu de Ia imagen) was held
at the ITDT in November 1966. He restaged a hoppen::1 0
J
by La Monte Young that impressed him in New Yo, L,
which explored th e ideo of provoking C1 separation fr': r, J
the sense of hearing by using on acute, continuous, •' :
disturbing electronic sound. Masotta leh his aud ience :ii
front of forty/ humbly-dressed, elderly men and women
who agreed to be stared at under strong lighting and
crowded on a stage, while a penetrating sound playe..l
in the room. The elderly agreed to be looked at unde1·
these aggressive circumstances in exchange for poy me 1~ ~
as extras in a play, something the publ ic was duly
informed of/ and who-in contrast to the elderly-couki
leave the room at thei1· leisure. Masotta defi ned hi s J
happen ing as "a n act of exp licit social sadism. "21
j
At the end of that year too/ Masotta and his team
organi zed the cycle On Happenings (Sabre Happenin8J1
 The idea was to gather fragments of fam ous past
ha penings from other parts of the world into one big,
ne~ ha ppening. "We copied them as if they were
scripted plays, wh_ich was a way of killing the happ~~in~
or tran sposing II to the rules of reproduc1bd1ty,
Jacoby recalls, given that a happening is supposed
to be a uniq ue and unrepealable event. It was an
intertextua l procedure in that it took a set of quotes and
used them to compose a new work that had nothing to
do with the orig inals. 22
The idea of the cycle was not to disseminate past
happenings, but rather to "prod uce, for the audience, a
similar siiuation to th at experienced by archaeologists
and psychoa nalysts," to confron t them with those
"rem ains," wh ich are no longer events but signs of
absent, pa st events. The shift towards media art is
obviou : "we were excited about the idea of an artistic
1 activity located in the 'media ' and not in things, 1n
informati on about the events and not the events."
At the Antibiennal
In Octob"'r 1966, a hearty contingent of avan t-garde
artists from Buenos Aires and Rosar io orga nized an
alternative event to th e Ill Bienal Americana de Arte
sponsored by ln dustrias Kaiser, in Cordoba which
beca me known as Antibiena/.23 Whi le at the Ill Biennial,
abstract neofigurative, and kinetic art abounded, the
Antib i~ n t; ial privileged street intervention, ambien t
piec ~ . La ppenings, conceptual art, and contemporary
danCio . C.ospite its improvised organization, most visua l
artists..• l' sicians, and theater groups associated with
the expsrimental scene were present. Among various
other actio ns, Ricardo Carreira carried out Chained
Actior fl a ace ion encadenada): he hung a long rope
J from tr _b lcony of an old house to the sidewalk across
th e s t ·· ~c' ) Pablo Suarez remembers it as an "entirely
un~ ec• · -f work: [Carreira] tied the enti re house with a
pla stic c:_ b e, as if it were a dog, to an electricity pole .""·'
On tl.2 last day, th e artists organized an improvised
collective action. The audience had gathered to witness
a new ha ppening en titled There 's Room in the World
for Everyone (En el mundo hay sitio para todos). Whi le
the auo ,ence patiently wa ited, some artists blocked the
door access by boarding it up so that no one else
could enter or leave the room . They left the audience
locked up for an hour, after wh ich time they returned
with a large group of students (who were on strike after
the assassination of a stud ent leader by the dictatorship).
They broke into the place singing slogans and th ey
carried out a protest that ended with a fiery speech in
front of the captive audience (which at that poi nt was
certainly less than captivated) .26
Thi s action prefigures many of the changes that took
place in 1968: the sh ift from work to action, from
individual to collective creation , the artistic appropriation
of th e procedures of radical political action, the
vindication of violence (in this case against the audience)
as aesthetic material, and close collaboration with socia l
and political opposition movements 27
The Itinerary of 1968
Throughout 1968, members of the avant-garde in Buenos
Aires and Rosario went through a di zzying process of
artistic and political radicalization tha t led to a series of
actions and interventions that culminated in Tucuman is
Burning (Tucuman Arde).2a The "new aesthetic" that those
artists postulated advanced the aboli ti on of boundaries
between artistic and political action: politica l violence
became aesthetic material, not only meta phorical ly or as
an invocation, but even appropriating resou rces, modes
and procedures from politics or, better, from radicali zed
left-wing organizations.
The Itinerary began on April 30, 1968, whe n the
opening of the Premia Very Estimar exhibition at the
Museo de Arte Moderno was abruptly in terrupted by
Eduardo Ruano, one of the artists who was invited to
participa te, along with a few friends. At the cry of
"Yankees Out of Vietnam! " and other similar slogans,
th e group headed towards a display case containing the
official photograph of Pres ident Kennedy behind a
protective glass. The artist took a lead brick and swiftly
destroyed the display case he himself had prepared a
few days before. The museum authorities ca lled the
police and th e protesters quickly dispersed. Ruano was
expelled from th e show, but the effect of his work had
already been ach ieved. The work wus not the display
89
 M!ll
' ~lli'
Tucuman Arde. Inauguration. General Confederation of Argentinean Workers (CGTA) trade union offices. Rosario. Argentina. November 1968
case that had been intact on the days leading to the
exhibit, nor the remains of its destruction, but rather the
action itself: to generate a protest and carry out an act
of political violence in the midst of an art institution ,
A few days later, 1968 Experiences (Experiencias
1968) opened at the ITDT, an event that concentrated
the limits of experimentalism, the growing political
radicalization of many Porteiio avant-gardists, and their
unsolvable conflicts with art institutions and the de facto
reg im e, Dur,ing the two weeks of the show, Pablo Suarez
stood at the door of the ITDT and distributed copies of his
letter to Jorge Romero Brest, Director of the Visual Arts
Center at the ITDT, and a firm supporter of experimental
art. In the letter, he expla ined his decision not to
participate in Experiences in any other way, while at the
same tim e calling his letter of refusal his "work." He
called to artists of his generation to express their own
views outside of the institutional framework: "These four
walls hold the secret to transforming everything inside
into art, and art is not dangerous."29
For hi s part, Roberto Jacoby attempted to inscribe hi s
critique within the limits of the ITDT and displayed a fiery
declaration in which he quoted a passage from a letter
that the Mexican writer, Octavia Paz, had sent in 1966
to the Art of the Media group in which he wrote,
90
~Ml! r!
"aesthetic contemplation is over because aesthetics has
dissolved into social life." He concluded also tha t, "The
work of art is also over because life and the planet itself
are starting to become art," since "the future of art is not
linked to the creation of works of art, but rather to th e
definition of a new concept of life. " Jacoby's entry-
which he defined as a "media/political/utopian mix" '-
was comp leted by the inclusion of a photograph showin g
an African-American carrying a banner that read, "I am
a man," and a teletype device connected to the IK Ws
agency, France-Presse. Without an y premeditati on en
th e part of the artist, th e device transmitted cabl es · :~~.
information about the student and worker revolts :;.t'; J
shook France in those days. Thu s, in Jacoby's installat:' ': t,
May 1968 in France was directly linked to the Ar·g en: s
public, who was able to learn about, discuss, and lake
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home the news cable printouts .Jt
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On that occasion too, Oscar Bony presented il! s
polemical piece The Working-Class Family (La fa m:'iu
obrera). This piece featured a worker, his wife, and their
1
ten-year old ch ild sitting on a platform, on public di s Icy
during the opening times of the show. They were J
accompanied by a soundtrack the artist crea ted with
recordings from sounds of their dai ly life at home.
A sign announced, " Luis Ricardo Rodriguez, a machi nist
by profession, is earning twice his normal salr' r/
Oscar Bony, La familia obrera IThe Working Class Family), Buenos Aires. Argentina. 1968/1999

91
-""""""~~------
for staying at the exhibit with his wife and child for
the duration of the show." Commenting on the adverse
reactions the piece elicited, Bony explained, "The
work was grounded on ethics, and I assumed the
role of the torturer." 32
The work that provoked the greatest conflict was not
precisely the one with the most explicit political content.
Roberto Plate showed a simulacrum of a public toilet
where visitors could enter empty cubicles with the usual
labels, "Ladies" and "Gentlemen." The artist managed
to make the public feel a certain degree of respect for
their privacy in order to produce "acts of emotional
release."JJ Some of the anonymous graffiti that began to
spontaneously cover the walls of the cubicles spoke out
against Ongania 's regime, and due to legal charges,
the work was banned by the police, under the charge of
going against "public morals." Surprising ly, instead of
shutting down the entire exhibit, the police banned only
Plate's piece . For an entire day, hundreds of people
attended a transformed (and deformed) show: a
policeman and a seal closing off the entrance to th e
"bathroom" became part of the work. Censorship itself
had involuntarily become part of the show.
The reaction of artists was immediate: they signed a joint
declaration condemning censorship, they destroyed their
own works, and threw the debris out on the street,
producing a chaotic situation that ended up in another
intervention by the police and several people being
arrested. With this collective and radical action, they
thus defin itively abandoned the institutional space that
had, up to that point, sheltered them.
A similar action by the Rosario avant-garde occurred in
July when Romero Brest was interrupted while delivering
a lecture at the hall of the Friends of Art in Rosario .
Ten artists staged an "assault" they defined as the
"s imulacrum of an attack" and a "collective work."
Using a strategy employed by guerrillas, each member
of the group had a task: one led Romero Brest to the end
of the hall, another one shut down the lights, the oth ers
stood in th e front. While some shouted slogans, others
read a fiery declaration that vindicated the life of Che
Guevara as the greatest work of art in existence.
92
Some of the actions of the Itinerary of 1968 display the
literal and symbolic closure of the traditional exhi bition
space and the shift of art to other environments . Since
May, the Rosario avant-garde had been organ izing a
Cycle of Visual Experiences (Cicio de Experiencias
Visuales) in a small rented space located in a com mercial
gallery. On September 9, Eduardo Favario presented an
action that consisted in closing down the gallery. The
public invited to the opening found instead a closed space,
with signs of being abandoned, the door sealed off with
a notice of closure placed by the artist, and a sign that
directed the public to another place in the city. In this way,
the work was constituted as an urban journey perfor·med
by the public who heeded the artist's instructions.
Some days later, Rodolfo Elizalde and Emilio Ghil ioni
staged a fake street fight. This action was once aga in
held in the middle of the street and in front of cha nce
observers. The two artists confronted one another, fi rst
verba lly and then physically. They tore up th eir own
posters, ran away with the aide of a group of suppor·ters,
and then were surrounded by people who spontaneously
interceded and attempted to separate them.
A few weeks later, a lock-up action staged by Graciela
Carnevale unintentionally closed down the Cycle. The
public was once again invited to a gallery opening and
was leh waiting inside the space. Carnevale appeared,
locked up the only door, and leh. For more than one hour,
the public locked up inside and those crowding the outside
awaited something: for the artist to show up again, put an
end to the practical joke, and begin the work . The or~ ist
intended to materialize an aggressive act as an arti tic
work. The "lockup" was no longer lived as a simulation ' ut
rather as a violently charged vital experience.
Her intention was that the public who was locked up would
react violently and would break the glass to get out, but
that was not what happened. The artist reported that "the•e
was such tension between the inside and the outside, that
the kick that broke the glass was from someone outside
rather than inside, in a rescue effort." Another person, who
deemed that the action had been ruined by the kick, hit the
man on the head with an umbrella. The police appeared
at the scene of the brawl and shut down the place- this
time literally-as a resu lt of the unrest.
Eduardo Favario, Dbra clausurada (Closed Work). Rosario, Argentina, September 9. 1968

Gracie Ia Carnevale. Encierro y escape IConfinement and Escape), Rosario, Argentina. October 8. 1968

93
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Victor Gripro. Trc1ditional Rural Ot en for Making Bread, Plaza Roberto Arlt, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1972

94
With th e links to the ITDT and the art circuit drastically
severed, these artists attempted to take their actions to
the streets. A year after Che's death , a group planned a
clandestine operation that consisted of dyeing the water
in the fountains of several squares in central Buenos
Aires red . They set out early in the morning as couples,
retending to be lovers, with a third one who would
reep watch, carrying liters of concentrated dye. They
had set up a press operation for that morning, with the
expectation of the impact that they hoped to cause by
their "bloody" fountains. The action failed because they
did not realize that the water in the fountains was not
recycl ed , and the dye disappeared immediately. Th e
action still shows the ri sk impul se behind those street
actions in th e midst of the dictatorship. J4
Abandoning the limits of th e institution and taking over the
streets entails a loss of the safety of a known environment
and moving to an unprotected, vulnerable space. The artist
risks not only his or her body, but also the body of the
work, wh ich at times is the body of the audience. The
gesture of (ex)posing the body during these times impl ied
real ri sf s and had very concrete consequences: police
repression, shut-downs, harassment, and imprisonment.
The Oven
In September 1972, the Centro de Arte y Comunicaci6n
(CAYC) opened the show, Art and ideology in CAYC
Outdoc:·. (Arte e ideologia en CAYC of aire fibre) at Pla za
Robertc.., , 1 ~ , located in downtown Buenos Aires. Around
forty w,- r1,_ were exhibi ted, along with the participation
of thec.2r, performance, and art groups. Many of the
propo.)c..is were colored by the extreme politicization that
Argentine society was going through in the period, wh ich
was e·tidenced in popular revolts in the streets during the so-
called Curdobazor 1969. This period of growing activity by
guerril!o ~ oups included the stepping down of the Lanusse
militar ~· ' :'olorship, which gave way to the first elections
since t E coup of 1955 in which Peron ism was not banned.
The publiL square was populated by explicit allusions to
the climate of repression, parallels between the dictatorship
and Nazism , references to the Trelew massacre (the illegal
executi on of sixteen political prisoners in a Patagonian jail,
just onE' month before the exhibition opening), signs of
mourn: 18 for Jhe fallen militants, and calls to arms.
In this context, Victor Grippo, along with Jorge Gamarra
and A. Rossi , an artist and rural worker respectively,
built a bread oven in the Plaza, and the next day they
got it up and running. On a brick platform and in the
middle of a square where a contemporary art exhibit
was set up, the presence of a rural oven where bread
was prepared and then distributed to the audience could
not have been stranger. The work implies a revaluing of
popular knowledge, and the transfer of an everyday
rural object to an urban context. But the operation was
not simply to show an object outside of its context; the
action involved the building of the oven in public view,
the making of bread, and its distribution. Bread is
socia lized, but so is the knowledge, the technique, and
the memory of this process, whic h is dormant in
metropolitan life . On th e other hand, to distribute the
warm bread that has been baked in a newly-built oven
emphasizes the fact that it is the product of an unfinished
"doing " in the present. What is emphasized is not the
object, but rather the exhibiting of a process, and the
involvement of others in that process.
Just one day aher it opened, municipal officials ordered
the shutdown of the exhibit at Plaza Roberto Arlt because
it contained strong critical references to the dictatorship .
The police (including the Explosives Brigade) surrounded
the square, confiscated and destroyed the works. The
bread oven suffered the same fate-a municipal truck
carried its remains away to an unidentified location.
La Plata's Avant-Garde
In the city of La Plata , a group of artists gathered arou nd
the central figure of Edgardo Antonio Vigo also devel oped
several action art proposals in the 1960s and early
1970s. Vigo was an artist, experimental poet, the initiator
of mail art in Argentina, a critic and editor of decisive
reviews such as Hex6gono and Diagonal Cero3s He
began a series of signaling events that he continued
making until1975 with Traffic Signal Control/Handful of
Traffic Lights (Manoio de semaforos, 1968) Joln thi s work,
he called on the public through radio broadcasts and the
local papers to wa tch a set of traffi c lights that regulated
the heavy traffic at the intersection of two important
avenues in the city. By unleashing thi s collective poetic
action, Vigo aimed at transformin8 ihe way we see on
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Ed garcia Antonio Vi go. Seria/amienit' IIO. l, ~. 1ancjo de scmaforos (Signal Pain I
V· I, 13r •,rh of Tmfh: /_::r' 13:, Cuu;os t 11 1 ~-. AHJ!!ntinJ OctoiJer 25, 1968 1
vVet·yday, invi sible ob ject into som ething more than its "on un expected oesthetic experience/' In 1974, at l')
J
practical/utilitarian fun ction. Vigo proposed seeing it in show, Art of Systems in Latin America (Arte de Siste ~li')
an unalienated and denaturalized way. J7 en Latinoamerica), Antwerp, Be lgium, he exhibitec o J
young prostitute with a sign that read in French, "Whot
Another member of the group, Carlos Ginzburg, created is Art? Prosti tution _" In this way he repeated Masotto'.
a serie of actions that he defined as mass aesthetic and Bony's gestures of hir ing people who wou ld agrc)e J
ex periences, involving not only his own body but also to be exhibited.
those of others, as active participants, starting in 1969_ J
In 1971, during the exh ibit Art in Systems (Arte en Another native of La Plata, Lui s Pazos, in 1973 (during the
Sistemas) at the Museo de Arte Moderno, he wrote the exciting months leading up to Peron's return from exile in
word "Earth " ("Tierra ") in enormous characters on the Spain, which produced growing expectation and pol iticc.:l
J
ground of a vacant lot near th e mu se um. From the street, radicalization), created the series Live Tran sformations of
the inscription could not be read, but a sign clearly the Masses (Transformaciones de las masas en vivo). J
directed viewers to go to a window in th e exhibition With a group of teenage students, he created a series of
space whet·e they could see the intervention and have situations 01· figut·es he then photographed. Some of ihc ,_
pictures circu lated widely in the form of postcards. Among
them is one showing rows of boys lying on the floor of a
terrace in the letter "V" under a "P," th e symbol of the old
slogan "Long Live Peron!" ("Viva Peron") updated as
"Peron is bac k" ("P eron
' vue Ive ").
In Spite of the Terror
On March 24, 1976, a new coup d'etat began the
bloodiest dictatorship in Argentine hi story. State
terrori sm was systematically used to illega lly exterminate
all opposition-not only guerrilla organizations, but
also combative unions, student movements, cri ti ca l
intellectua ls, etc. The kidnapping and disappearance of
more than 30,000 people disseminated terror beyond
the cla ndestine detention centers and paralyzed a large
portion of society.
In spite of this brutal context, some collective in itiatives
appeared which allowed, albeit in an isolated and
temporary way, a re-arti culation of socia l bonds, and a
prod uction of spaces of resistance and strateg ies to
challenge the government's destructive power. The
Cucano group was one of those extraordinary crea ti ve
experiences that happened during this period of terror.
Between 1979 and 1983, a group of young people from
Rosari o who would get together to read and play music
carried out some risky activities in public space in order to
chang e th e norma lity of daily life under the de facto
regi me. CJne of these ephemeral performances happened
on a Suw.i'- y during a church mass. Several members of
the grou: mixed in with the congregation and when the
Catholic 1itu al began, one pulled out a set of binoculars
and poi1 1ied them at the priest, another one began to
loudly beg for alms whi le moving around the church in a
wheeichoir. Yet another began to confess out loud to any
one who wan ted to hear a deta iled description of his
frequent masturbation, and finally, one last Cucano-aher
receivi ng th e communion host-vomited on the priest In
this way, they completely disrupted the normative
operation of an institution that was considered largely
complid .vith the regime. The actions of the Cucano group
did not fa ll under the standard format of political protest,
but they were tremendously effective (and unheard-of) in
terms of affecting an instituted order on a micro scale 3s
In parallel fashion in Buenos Aires, from the end of the
dictatorship and through the 1980s, an art activism
collective emerged, first under the acronym "Gas-Tar"
(Grupo de Artistas Socialistas-Taller de Arte Revolucionario/
Group of Socialist Artists-Workshop of Revolutionary Art)
and later as "CAPataco" (Colectivo de Arte Participativo-
Tarifa Comun / Collective of Participatory Art-Comm unal
Tariff). This group gathered dozens of young artists, in
some cases organically linked to the Trotskyite party, MAS
(Movimiento al Socialismo /Movement to Socialism) . They
actively worked in the streets-especially in mobilization
conditions-producing silk screens that invited pedestrians
to intervene. They called them "partic ipatory banners"
("afiches participativos"). Equally, they organized massive
artistic-political actions li ke A Candle for Ch ile (Vela x
Chile), in which they ca lled upon the public to light
candles around Buenos Aires's obelisk to support Chi lean
opposition to the dictatorship of Pinochet; or Bicycles to
China (Bicicletas a Ia China), a bicyc le ride around
various parts of the city to mount a protest against the
Tian anmen Square massacre.
The creation of silhouettes is one of the most memorable
and visually powerful artistic/politica l practices that
were carried out in the public space of Buenos Aires and
many other citi es as vi ndi ca tio n of the human rights
movement in the early 1980s. Life-sized silhouettes were
produced by trac ing the outlin e of someone's body
lying on a piece of paper. The silhouettes were then
immediately pasted on city walls as a way to represent
the presence of an absence, or that of the 30,000
disappeared. The first Silhouette Action (Siluetazo) wa s
organized by three artists (Julio Flores, Guil lermo Kexel,
and Rodolfo Aguerreberry) who suggested to the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo that they employ th is techniq ue
mass ively during the Ill Marcha de Ia Resistencia (March
of Resistance) on Septerr.ber 21, 1983, while still under
the dictatorial regime The result was impressive
hundreds of protesters put their bodies in the place of
the absent ones, tracing and pasting silhouettes in an
improvised outdoor workshop until midnight, despite the
police repression that was in effect. The Silhouette Action
marks one of those exceptional moments in which artistic
initiative co incides with a demand for social movements,
and materializes with the support of a crowd. It
achieved the momentary "appropriation " or (poli tical
97
 and also aesthetic) "occupation" of the Plaza de Mayo
and its surroundings, a central location both in terms
of geography and of politics, economics, and symbolism
in Argentina . It constituted a visual attack in that it
appropriated an off-limits public space.
Actions During the Democracy
Once democracy was reestablished, starting in
December 1983, art actions developed both within
institutional spaces as well as in the streets, sometimes
closely connected to social and political movements . In
the 1980s, they emerged as underground or alternative
theater, music, and performance groups. The artist
Li liana Maresca was part of that trend and developed
shows and performances in new institutional spaces
(especially at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas),
marginal settings (Centro Parakultural), and even places
not connected with the art world (such as a laundromat).
In one of her last pieces, a few days before she died of
AIDS , Maresca (ex) posed her semi- or completely naked
body in a series of photographs taken by Alejandro
Kuropatwa and entitled Maresca Offers Herself to
Destiny (Maresca se entrega a todo destino). The series
was published as commercial advertisements in the
erotic literature review, The Libertine (EI Libertino). The
progressively naked body of the artist (which is also the
body of the work) appeared superimposed to that of a
prostitute-this time without the mediation of a third
party, as was the case of Ginzburg's action of 1974. It
was a critique of the commodification of art that avoids
any poss ibi lity of remaining outside th e conflict and
embodies it in the first person.
At the end of the 1980s, new artist collectives emerged
that once again took to the streets to perform their
actions. In 1989, the group Escombros (literally, "rubble")
achieved a large aud ience and artist participation in
collective actions carried out in abandoned spaces in
the surroundings of La Plata. In The City of Art (La ciudad
del arteL the second of their calls, the Escombros
performed Suture (Sutura) in an old quarry: they used a
naturally-existing, thirty-meter ditch or "wound" and they
"stitched " it with a rope . This and other actions of the
group insisted on an ecological protest against damage
effected on the planet. Through the Eye (Por el Oiu) was
98
one of the few activist artist collectives working in Buenos
Aires in the first few years of the Menem regime
(1989-1994). Their work focused primarily on urban
graphics, producing a number of murals in public places
such as train stations or plazas, with a specific code
including humor, political criticism, and a comi cs-style
visual language. They also created videos, and whenever
they were unable to produce their ideas for films because
of lack of resources or equipment, they did street
performances they termed "videos without camera. "39
Escraches
In 1996, a human rights group named HIJOS (literally,
children) was created to bring together the children of
the disappeared, many of whom were coming of age at
that time. HUOS decided to act against the impu nity J
granted to the authors and executors of the genoc ide,
committed during the last dictatorship and sanctioned by
the so-called Pardon Laws and amnesty gran ted by
President Menem, to a handful of commanders who had
been sentenced in 1985 . They demanded justice and . '1
sought to generate social condemnation among th ose
who live their daily li ves alongside the un pun i hed
repressors. To accomplish this, they invented "escraches,"
a kind of direct action that begins by discovering the
whereabouts of the repressor (their home and work 1
addresses) or the clandestine places whe re torture and
assassination took place. Then this inform ation is
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disseminated thwug h an acti ve, con sc iousness-i·ui.,ing
campa ign in the ne ighborhood. Finally, a c ;1 to
mobili zation is issued, urging neighbors not to fw y' by
marking the site in the comm unity's collective me ·1' 'J40
Two artists collectives were crucial in providing escroches
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wi th a recognizable visua l and performance ide ,, ity.
Emulating and at the same time subverting traffi c si gns,
)
GAC (Street Art Group/ Grupo de Arte Ca llejero) devised
a series of posters th at were installed in the surrounc,i "W 1
of a torturer's house, a clandestine detention ceni.:;r, a
secret maternity facility, or the place where the so-coiled
dea th flights (which took prisoners who were dropped
alive into the sea) leh from. These signs were also carried
by protesters during marches. For its part, the group
Etcetera created grotesque and delirious performances
i 11 the middle of escmches i 11 which Ihey impe 1 ~u " _,;.:;d
Liliana Mareon, Maresca se entrega /ado des tina (Maresca Offers Herself to Destiny), Buenos Aires. Argentina. 1993
torturers, ... .~m p licit priests, and kidnappers of babies
born in c ' >ity. The carn ivalesque and vi olently festive
nature of ti1 is practice challenges the pact of silence that
the govern ment ha s instituted.
The creali ,,_ c imension of this new type of protest, which
manages : socially re-enact a claim for justice and
punish mc_: . r those responsib le for the genocide, has
remained "':.s sn tially invisible to the world of art. Thi s
silence wa, : 'rastically broken aher the popular rebellion
of 2001 , a : ' isis that stimu lated the initiatives of acti vist
art throu ghou t the country, using a variety of street
actions th at affected and cha nged both the traditional
concept of politics and the limits of art.
"To Live in Art"
Th is journey through some of the key episodes of action
art in Argentina in the last half centu ry is indeed
selective and could have included other chapters. -:1 One
could think of the co inc idences and re lationsh ips wi th
simi lar production and practices in oth er parts of th e
world , although to understand their specific ity one musi
consider the ways that artists attempt to intervene in a
particular histori cal context and the effects they try to
bring about, all of wh ich often implies a challenge and
blurring of the separation between art and li fe . In th at
sense, rather than confirming the formula Art 7: Life,
some of the episodes summarized here propose
reformu lati ons or attempts at bridging the gap th at
Moder·nity opened between both domains . The mel tin g
99
 of art into social life that Octavio Paz announced in
1966 vis-a-vis the experiments by the Art of the Media
group42 produced various artistic (and political
programs) in Argentina. Several of the experiments
discussed imagine a new form of confluence between
art and life, their mutual imbrication and redefinition .
I began thi s text with an anecdote, and I close it with
another equally illustrative and mythical one. In 1969,
Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos received a Guggenheim
Fellowship, wh ich, as is well-known, often has hel ped
Latin American intellectual s and artists in need. The artist
decided to use a fair amount of that large sum of money
to finance a lavish dinner for som e twenty-five fr iends
at the Alvear Palace Hotel, and used the rest of th e
money simply to live. "Instead of 'pain ting ' a banquet, 1
gave a banquet," he explained to the Foundation
officials who requested an explanation 4J That was how,
entirely with self-confidence, Pera lta Ramos defined
his attempt to "live in art."

Th e other two members besides Masotta were Juan Jose Sebreli and Carlos Correas . They were the young wing of th e Contorno (Outline )
magazine, the first group who revis ited the comparison frequently drawn between Peronism and fascism predominant amongst Argen tine
intellectuals in this period. The fi rst two also collaborated in the newspaper Close obrera (Working Class), which disseminated the idea s of the
Movimento Obrero Comunista (MOC). Under the direction of Rodolfo Puiggr6s, it postulated an articulation between Peronism and Marxism,
between proletarians and inte llectua ls. Years later th ese postulates would be the basis of the Argen tin e New Left.
2 This idea was suggested by artist Roberto Jacoby, in an interview with the author in 2003. J
3 Among them, Ricardo Carreira spoke of "un-accus tom ing " ("deshabi tuaci6n") as the effect that avant-garde art should produce. Edgardo Vigo
postu lated a "revulsive art. " See Ana Lon goni, "EI deshabitua dor," Arte y literatura en Ia Argentina del siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Espigas, 2006).
4 Editor's note ''Vivo-dito" is most frequently translated as, "living finger"; it refers to the 'signalling' aspect of a work, in which the artist s" lects
I
and points out situation s in the real world. See, Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art in the I 960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, lnes Katzenstein
and Andrea Giunta, eds. (New York The Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 38-55.
5 Fredric Ja meson suggests that the 1960s should be thought of as a long decade that lasts longer than the ten years marked by th e calendar.
I
Their organic unity is held by "a hypothesis about the rhythm and dynamics of the fu ndamental situation in which those very different levels
develop according to their own internal lows." Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the 60s," The 60's Without Apology, Social Text, No . 9/1 0,
(Spring-Summer, 1984), 179. 1
6 Kemble had been working si nce 19 57 on his series Suburban Landscapes (Paisajes suburbanos), collages made from sheet metal, card board,
wood, and other waste materials tha t migrants use to build their precari ous homes in shantytowns called "Mi sery villas" (villas miseria), but he
has not yet been able to show them. I
7 Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y politico (Buenos Aires: Paid6s, 200 1).
8 Greco produced hi s vivo-dito pieces in Paris, Piedra laves, Madrid, New York, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and oth er place s.
9 In "Segundo Manifiesto Vi vo Dilo," Greco traces the beginning of th e genre to 1954, whtn he bcgc11, to fil m people durin g hi s slay in Pc. i. "I
I
signed walls, objects, streets and bathroom s in Pari s, accompanied by Peiialba Lerchun di " Reprinted in Greco (Vo lencio : 1'/A 1, 1092), · . -~ -
10 He wrote the word "Fin · (' End ") on the palm of his hand, in Indio ink, before committing suicide b ingesting barbiturates in Barcelona in 1·JJ.5 . I
11 The Vivo-Di tos ore clearly related to Duchomp's reodymade;, olthough they keep a cerloin distance: fi rst, they do not corK el the everydoy fL · •· ,.1
nor remove th e found object (or sub ject) from their co ntext, but insteod th y point to ii in the very plocc where it exis ts (th erefore reinhc:n:· ,,.e
ephemeral nature of the pointing) ; second, they are not randomly chosen; ra ther, the ortisl ottribu!es to hi m or herself the capacity to r: vin' r Jt
that there is art in life, and that he or she is the only authori zed person to make thol presence known. II was from that insistent self-proclurn ' v'i,
I
and from the obortive pro ject of exhibiting homeless persons in an art gallery (which he proposed in Paris, 1962) fro m which other arti sts ..._., ·)d
take their cue to employ (in both senses of the word: to use and to hire) people as works, including Masotta in 1966 and Bon y in 1968.
)
Gwco also practiced another mode of art action he called ,. incorporation of characters in to the canvas," which consi sted in the public 'J ·: 0f
hoving a real person leon against a canvas in order to trace th eir outli ne with a paintbrush. He thus insisted on a painting that resists all min • ti c
prole lise, n,orking in slta d th trac of a live bod y's presence, a real life.
12 Other forerunners of th e happening in Buenos Aires included: in 1965, Death (La muerte) at the Lirolay Gallery (Dalila Puzzovio, P tb 6r,
l
Santantonin , Zulema Ciordia , Delio Cancela, David Mesejeon , Squ irru , Edgard o Gimenez, and Anton!o Berni) and the MiCI e>en!s
(Microsucesos) at Teatro La Recova (Marilu Mori ni, Edgardo Gimenez, Alfredo Rodriguez Arias, and Miguel Angel Rondano).
13 Jorg E.! Glu:;berg, Marta IIA.inujin (Bu ena Aires Museo Nacional de Bellas Aries, Buenos Aires, 1999). J
14 "Marla M inujin y su Suceso casi derri boron el Cerro ," El pais, Montevideo, July 26, 1965.
15 Pablo Suarez, David Lamelas, Radolfo Pray6n, Florea! Amor, and Leopolda Moler
16 As was mentioned, one feature of Argentine history starting in 1930, and which intensified from 1955 on, was the constant government
intervention by th e military through a seri es of coups ogoinsllhe elected governments who never monaged to complete their term s in ofl · '

100
 The group con sisted of Eduardo Costa, Roberto Jacoby, and Raul Escari.
17
Among them we could menhon the series Fashion Fictions produced by Eduardo Costa outside of Argentina, starting in 1968. He published
18 h graph s and ads in fash1on magazmes showmg unusual gold 1ewelry attached to the ears, toes, or fmgers of models, p1eces that only ex1sted
0 10
P 0 totypes and were not available commercially. In 1969, aher Costa relocated to New York for several years, he produced the Tape Poems
~~rJohn Perreault, which were related to the earlier taped works, and which included artists su ch as Vito Acconci and Hannah Weiner.
His writings on art are collected in Oscar Masotta: Revoluci6n en el arle (Buenos Aires : Edhasa, 2004).
19
The disti nction between the happening and m,;dio art relies on the distinc~,ive characteristics of the operations and "mate;ials" each uses._ The
20
terials of media art are presented more as soCia l rather than phys1cal, accordmg to Masotta, Jacoby, and El1seo Veron. See Happenmgs,
~fd. and Eli sea Veron, "La obra" (originally 1967), reprinted in Ramona, Nos. 9-10, Buenos Aires, 2000-2001 .
This happening by Masotta is clearly related to the famous installation, The Working-Class Family (La familia obrera), which was created two
21
years later by Oscar Bony as part of th e exh ibition, Experiencias 1968, at the ITDT, discussed further on in this essay
Roberto Jacoby, interview with Rosangela Rodriguez, July 1991. Included in Texlos diversos, unpublished manuscript, 232.
22
It was also known as the Parallel Biennial (Bienal Parole/a) or The First Festival of Contemporary Forms (Primer Festival de Formas
23
Contemporaneas).
4 Interview with Juan Pablo Renzi in Gui llermo Fan toni , Arte, vanguardia y politico (Buenos Aires: El Cielo par Asalto, 1998).
2
5 Interview with Pablo Suarez in Guillermo Fantoni, Tres visions sabre el arle crilico (Rosario: Escuela Editora, 1994).
2
6 See Guillermo Fantoni, "Horizontes problematicos de una vanguard ia de los aiios sesenta," Anuario, Segundo Epoca, No. 13, UNR,) 988,
2
and "EI impacto de Ia Nuevo en los primeros sesenta. Conformaci6n y emergencia de un grupo de vanguardia," Anuario, Segundo Epoca,
No. 14, UNR, 1989-1990.
27 This ha ppen ing is a clear precedent of the lock-up carried out by Graciela Carnevale as corollary to the Cicio de Arte Experimental in Rosario
two years later, which is discussed below.
28 This collective piece, carried out within the institutional framework of Central General del Trabajo de los Argentinas-a workers' union opposed
to th e didatcrship-is the most celebrated of all Argentin e avant-gmde works of the 1960s. For a di scussion of thi s piece and th e rest of th e
Itinerary, see Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, From the Di Tel/a to Tucuman Arde (Buenos Aires, El Cielo par Asalto, 2000).
29 Pablo Suarez, letter reproduced in Longoni and Mestman, Ibid .
30 Interview with Roberto Jacoby, included in Longoni and Mestman, Ibid.
31 A more direct link between the Argentine avant-garde and the events of May 1968 in France was the activist participation in Paris of Argentine
artists Julio Le Pare and Mario Demarco, who were eventually expelled from the country on account of their solidarity with the students. A few
years later, several Latin American artists residing in Paris, among them Le Pare, created a work group called "Latin American Non-Official Group
of Paris" ("America Latina No Oficial. Grupo de Paris"). They supported the agreements of the Latin American Visual Artists Encounter (Encuentro
de Plastico Latinoamericana) of Havana, 1972, as well as the boycott of the Bienal de Sao Paulo, which was held in the context of a dictatorship.
32 In the review, la Maga, Buenos Aires, June 16, 1993, 11.
33 Roberto Plate, written as justification for the work previousl y presented at ITDl
34 This acli )n is sim iiar to the experiments by the Argentine Nicolas Garcia Uriburu , first at the 1968 XXXIV Biennale di Venezia, and in other
Europeon ~ ; t ie s He dyed the waters in Venetian canals and in vari ous fountain s green as an nvironmenlal protest. Whil e the procedure \vas
simil ar (green/sap, red/blood), the underlying ideas were different: green canals allude Ia the defense of life in ecological terms, the red
fountain alluded Ia political assa ssination.
35 See Fernn ndo Davis, "Seiialar y revulsionar. Edgardo Antoni o Vigo en los margenes de Ia poesio ", en Jorna do s sobre Arte y Arquitectura en
Argentin:t (La Plata lnslituto de Hisloria del Arlc Argentino y Americana, Faculiad de Bellas Aries - UN LP, 2007) .
36 Another work that can be read in close connection Ia Greco's vivo-dilo pieces and Vigo's signs is Signalling Three Objects (Seiialamiento de
Ires objelos), 1966, by David Lamelas, which con sisted in surrounding a lamppost, a fol ding chair, and a tree in a park with white circles.
37 Eighty r wple congregated for the event, although the artist himself decided not to attend This implies a different operation vi s-6-vi s Greco's
vivo-d!iC' p;ece s, given that, for Vigo, th e arti st is not necessary for the ae sthetic experien ce to lake pl ace.
38 See Ce< :: i; Marcus, "En Ia biblioteca vaginal un di scurso amoroso," Politicos de Ia memoria, No. 6, (Summ0r 2006-2007) Bueno1 Aires, CeDINr:l
39 DanielS - :urjo, interview with the author, Buenos Aires, 2007.
40 Escra-:i·, ~ comes fro m the word 'escrachar, a slang term used in th e River Plate region meaning lo uncover, make known, mark.
41 For remu s of space I had lo exclude from this narrative many crucial names and episodes thai deserve more attention than a mere mention in
a footnote . Among them, Lea Lublin, Leopolda Moler, the Microsucesos in the 1960s; FOSA, La Organizaci6n Negra, Ar Delroy, and the
activi ti es of Barraco Vorticista starting in the 1990s; Taller Popular de Serigrafia, Arde! Arle, Co sluras Urbanas, Urbomaquia, and several
other activist art collectives thai emerged around the popular rebe llion of December 200 1.
42 Octavia Pa z, "Carla, " in Oscar Masolta el al., Happenings, (Buenos Aires Jorge Alvarez, 1967).
43 Peralta R mos sent a letter to Mr. James Mathias of the John Simon Guggenheim Founda tion in 1971, explaining how he had used the fund s
of the Guggenheim Fellowship he received in 1969.

101
 Naked Man, Flaming Chickens: A Brief History of Brazilian Performance Art
Claudia Calirman
It was August 12, 1965, one year into Brazil's brutal
1964-1985 military dictatorship. Samba dancers were
coming down Mangueira Hill, the oldest slum of Rio de
Janeiro. Five of them were dressed in Helio Oiticica's
legendary Parangoles-a series of multi-colored and
multi-layered capes-and they were ready to enter the
salons of the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro
(MAM-RJ). The occasion was the opening of the
exhibition Opinion 65 (Opiniao 65) at the museum. '
Without official sanction, Oiticica had decided to debut
his Parangoles by bringing members of the Mangueira
School of Samba to do a performance at the museum.
The Parangoles were meant to be experienced as lived
situations, since the artist only considered them complete
when the participant's body and its movement were
incorporated into them2
But the white, upper-middle class elites that dominated
the museum were not quite ready to absorb that
spectacle. According to the artist Rubens Gerchman:
This was the first time that the common people
entered the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de
Janeiro: Nobody knew if Oiticica was a genius or
a madman ... He entered th e Museum with the
members of Mangueira Hill and everybody
followed him. They tried to expel him but Oi ticica
started screaming that if black people could not
enter the museum , that this was racism. After being
expelled, Oiticica went to the Museum 's garden,
bringing with him th e crowd that was already
inside the Museum. J
Opinion 65 was the first exhibition in which visual artists
responded to the dictatorship right aker the coup d'etat
in 1964. It proved that artistic experimentation was
increas ingly associated with a consideration of the
individual 's place in society, both socially and politically.
It also changed the status of MAM-RJ from an elitist
institution to a space that attracted students and
intellectuals. Thus, from the mid-1960s on, MAM-RJ
Hel io Oiticica. P,uangoles. 1964 - 1968. frame from 1-Jn. a fil mby Ivan Cardoso. Rio rle Janeiro. Rruzi!, 1979
102
became the place for artists to come together and
discuss their projects and ideas.
These discussions came to significant fruitio n in the
exhibitions that followed Opiniao 65, such as Opinion
66 (Opiniao 66, August, 1966), and New Brazilian
Obiectivity (Nova Obietividade Brasileira, April 6-30I
1967) . In the latter, Oiticica showed his seminal
penetrable Tropicalia .4
The festival of performances, Art in Aterro: A Month of
Public Art (Arte no Aterro: um Mes de Arte Publica, July
6-28, 1968),s became a watershed event, movi ng
beyond the confinements of the museum's wal ls and
incorporating the audience into the artistic proce s. The
festival consisted of a monthly series of public art events,
organized by the critic Frederico Morais, all of which took
place in a park close to the grounds of MAM-RJ _6 The
event was a sort of gigantic Happening sponsored by the
Rio de Janeiro newspaper, 0 Diorio de Notfcias. The
highlight of Art in Aterro was a public event coordinated
by Oiticica ca lled Apocalipopotese, which took place on
Su nday akernoons in Flamengo Park? Apocalipopotese
is a Portuguese neologism that combines the word for
"apocalypse" with that for "hypothesis." Among ihe artists
who took part in this event were Antonio Manuel, Lygia
Pope, Jackson Ribeiro, and Roberto Lanari, to narne just
a few. John Cage appeared incognito, only to be later
recognized through photographs. ll
Apocalipopotese consisted of a number of ar t' stic
events happening simu ltaneously and apparently
having nothing in common with each other except that
they all required the spectators' partici pafion. 9
Oiticica was at the center of the counte rcul 1ure
movement in Rio de Janeiro, and his ideas about
integrating the work of art with the public's particip tion
were very appealing to younger artists such as A tonio
Manuel. Manuel had met Oiticica at MAM-PJ in
1967. Despite their ten-year age difference, th ey
immediately formed a strong friendship .
 InApocalipop6tese, Manuel showed his series, Hot Ballot
Boxes (Urn as Ouentes), from 1968 . 1o They consisted of
twenty sealed boxes containing photographs or texts
taken from current newspapers or photographic archives
relating to the violence in the streets. The content of each
box was different and each one had to be broken
into by the public with a hammer, which required
a brutal action . Oiticica became especially interested
in one of Manuel 's Hot Ballot Boxes. It was an image
of a skinny boy from Biafra, Africa . After seeing this
work, Oiticica invited Manuel to collaborate with him
on the creation of Parangole Nirvana, 1968 . Oiticica
created the structure for this Parangole, and gave
the work its title, while Manuel inserted the image of the
boy from Biafra into it. ''
Apocalipop6tese, Lygia Pope showed The Egg
At
(0 Ovo, 1968), consisting of large, wooden, cubic
(not ovoid-shaped) structures, covered with a plastic
membrane. From inside these breakable boxes, members
from a samba school burst out dancing and playing
music in an analogy to birth. 12 Rogerio Duarte hired a
dog trainer for the event, who brought animals to the
park and trained them before the public. Perhaps not by
accident, on the day followi ng Duarte's performance, the
newspapers published an account of the use of police
dogs in public demonstrations against the military
regime, played out in the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
By challenging traditional art along with existing art
institutions, the artists intended to break with archaic
structures and affirm their own individua lity and right to
self-expression at a repressive moment in Brazilian history.
At MAM-RJ's XIX National Salon of Modern Art (XIX Saloo
de Arte Moderna) in 1970, an annual salon sponsored
by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and Education,
Antonio Man uel decided to present himself as th e work of
art. On the submission form, next to the title, The Body is
e
the Work (0 Corpo a Obra, 1970), Manuel gave the
dimensions of his own body as the measurements of the
work. Manuel claimed that as a work of art he had the
right to stay in the museum along with all the other works
that had been submitted, until the jury made its decision
about which works would be accepted: "I tried to stay
during the selection of the works of art presented to the
jury, si nce, being the work of art itself, I had the right to
104
stay there to be judged. But the jury asked me to leave
and refused to accept me as a work of art."1 3
To present his own body as a work of art was a way for
Manuel to confront the jury and question their arbitrary
rules of selection. The Body is the Work was an odd and
unexpected piece to be entered into a salon, much in
the same fashion as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain.14 In
the Duchampian tradition , Manuel also questioned the
role of art institutions with their exclusionary practices
and often-conventional attitudes.
When the jury refused Manuel as a work of art, they
asserted that the museum did not have suitable conditions
to maintain him until the opening day of th e exhibition 1
let alone to feed and support him until it wa s over. I;
Rejected by the jury, Manuel attended the openi ng night
of the exhibition nonetheless, as one of th e museum's
I
guests, but he became upset when some people started
pointing at him and repeating : "Refused, refu sed,
refu sed." Manuel's response was to take off his clothes.
When Manuel arri ved at the third floor of th e museum
I
I
he stepped out onto the parapet, holding on to a pole
that ran alongside the staircase. Down below, in the
mezzanine, the guests that came for the opening of the
salon were appa lled . Manuel had to flee, seeking refuge
at the home of his friend , the art critic Mario Pedrosa.
The police immediately closed down the show oher the
arti st's impromptu defiance. J
Manuel 's action was unexpected, uncalculated , and I
irreverent. It was intended to be a hum oro1·s and
immediate response to his 1·ejection by th e sa :o11 and
was an impulsive act of transgression. His spontaneous
performance became a symbol of resistance agai nst the
unquestioned rules of art salons and exhi bi ti ons in
Brazil , as we ll as against the lack of consistent c1 iteria
regarding censorship of the arts by the military reg ime.
Manuel's naked intervention at the opening of the XIX
National Salon of Modern Art was praised by Mario J
Pedrosa as an "experimenta l exercise of freedo m, " 16an
expression co ined by Pedrosa in 1970.17 He used it to
describe artistic practices that were not market-oriented.
It referred to impermanent art that cou ld not be presented
Antonio Ma ru~ l . 0 corpo ea obra (The Bodv is the Work). Rio de Janeiro. Brazil. May 1970

105
 ,.(
'
' •
I
I
Lygia Pape. Divisor, Rio de Janeiro. Brazil. 1968 (1990)
as a commodity to consumer society, but instead, consisted
of collective actions and gestures drawn from the
imagination. The artists that interested Pedrosa conceived
of art not as a finished product, but as an open
proposition , a situation to be lived or experienced. Ia
In taking off his clothes in the museum, Manuel also
exposed the vulnerability of his body to the uncertainties
unleashed by the forces of repression. In discussing the
mechanisms of power used on the body in Discipline and
Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Michel Foucault
asserts that the threat of torture is one of the main tools
used to enforce compliance with disciplinary regimes, thus
106
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1
rendering the subiect of thi s threat obedient and doci:2.19
According to Foucault, "The body is directly involved in a
l
political field; power relation s have an immediate hold
upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to J
carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.": J It
is usually the body that becomes the primary subiect of
oppression in repressive political regimes . Man uel's
naked, male body showed its fragi lity before the
mechanisms of power exercised by the state at the time .
Manuel's exposure was a transgression of a taboo, J
and moreover, unpremeditated; therefore, the sudden
presentation of his body as a living sculpture in on r•n ti-
J
heroic pose was all the more forceful. As Oiticica stated
in his famo us essay, "General Scheme of the New
Objectivity" ("Esquema Geral do Nova Objetividade"),
the spirit of a new Brazilian avant-garde art was
basical ly summarized in the following motto: "By
Adversity We Live!" ("Do Adversidade Vivemos! ").21 By
stepping on the parapet of the MAM-RJ and gripping a
pole wi th one hand while extending his other arm in the
air, Manuel looked as if he were holding an invisible
banner carrying Oiticica's motto emblazoned on it. In
presenting hims.elf as a ~~~i~g s,culpture, 0anuel became
the person ification of 01t1c1ca s prophetic words.
The only surviving documents from Manuel's performance
at MAM-RJ were the photographs taken by the media .
However, two months after The Body is the Work was
rejected by the salon , Manuel created the installation
Bodywork (Corpobra, 1971), in order to transform his
ephemeral performance into a permanent object of art. He
built a human-sized, rectangular, wooden box with straw
at the bottom and Plexiglas in the front, as if it were a hand-
made crote used to store and transport a work of art.
The box con tained a black-and-white photograph of
Manuel 's performance on the staircase of the MAM-RJ .
A stri p of cardboard inscribed with the word,
"Corpobra" was hung over his genitals like a censor's
black bar. Behind th e box, a rope mechanism allowed
the aud ience to unveil Manuel's naked body. This playful
game of '".:il ing and unveiling , concealing or revealing,
affirmed .'":on uel's role as the author of a legitimate work
of art. In _hallenging the conventions of public display
1
of the mc :.. body, Manuel's act was reminiscen t of one
by artist F16vio de Carvalho who, fourteen years earlier,
on October 18, 1956, had strolled down the bustling
Avenida Pa ulista in Sao Paulo, wearing an irreverent
outfit of hi own design, including a summer hat, mini-
skirt, and b hnet stockings. Carvalho wanted to create a
new stylp targeted at businessmen from the tropics,
subverting accepted norms for gender distinctions in
fashion d ign n This provocative event became
recognized as the first performative art action in Brazil.
Subseq uently, performance art unfolded in many
different ways in Brazil, becoming a fascinating field
1
that shcv· the prevailing stru ctures. Fwm Oiticica's
object-oriented Parangoles, to Manuel's exposure of his
own body as the object of art, this investigation
subsequently moved into Lyg ia Pope's and Lygia Clark's
experiments in creating a collective body.
In Pope's Divisor (1968), she invited the audience to
stick their heads through holes cut out of a long cotton
sheet, bringing them together as a unitary body in the
crowd. Lygia Clark's multi-sensorial experiences shifted
emphasis away from the classical notion of art as
commodity, emphasizing the viewer's perceptions and
responses. In Walking (Caminhando , 1963), Clark
simply invited the spectator to make a Mobius strip. She
gave the following instructions: "You take the band of
paper wrapped around a book, you cut it open, you
twist it, and you glue it back together so as to produce
a Mobius strip."23 Thus, the artist becomes a facilitator
of the creative process that is only completed by the
viewer's own journey.
Clark's path would evolve in the boundaries between art
and therapy, self and other, inside and outside, public
and private . In the series of works that she executed at
the Sorbonne, Paris, such as Collective Body (Corpo
Coletivo, 1972-1975), she engaged her students in
multi-sensorial experiences, inviting them to touch and
feel, generating situations in which the experience was
no longer purely visua l, but mostly tactile.
In Anthropophagite Slobber (Baba Antropofagica,
1973), standing participants held spools of thread in their
mouths and slowly pulled out the strings, creating a
symbolic, collective experience of vomiting. They used th e
wet strings to bind the body of another participant who
laid down on the floor. In Cannibalism (Cannibalismo,
1973), one participant lay on the floor while the rest sat
in a circle with blindfolds over their eyes, communicating
with one another solely by touch. These participants ate
fruits that were placed inside the abdominal pockets of
th e recumbent person 's suit, in an anthropophagite act.
Once the fru it was digested, all that was left was the
memory of the experience lived by the participants 24
Metaphors for the body were also part of the vocabulary
of the artists who opted for staying in Brazil during the
most repressive years of th e military dictatorship
107
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.l

I
Lygia Clark, 0 eu e a tu (The I and the You), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1968
j

1
108
 (1968-1974) . Artur Barrio turned his Bloody Bundles
(Trouxas Ensanguentadas, 1968-1970) into the most
viscera l work of art challenging the forces of oppression
in Brazil at the time. He bought forty-four pounds of meat
and bones in a slaughterhouse and wrapped them in
fabri c and rope to make fourteen Bloody Bundles. These
horrific pieces represented what appeared to be the
remains of people tortured by the dictatorship. They
alluded to the graphic, lacerated limbs and mutilated
corp ses found in rivers and sewage sites during the
mili tary regime. This work was part of the exhibition
a
From the Body to the Earth (Do Corpo Terra), in which
artists were invited in 1970 to create site-specific, body
art and earth works at the Municipal Park in th e city of
Beio Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais. 2s

The population of Belo Horizonte would mistake these

stained bundles for actual, dismembered human parts.
Their presence in public spaces suggested the vulnerability
of society at the hands of a repressive regime. They were
also considered an indictment of the crimes committed by
the B azilian death squads. Barrio's Bloody Bundles were
presented for the public's gaze in rivers, sewage sites, and
in the main streets of Belo Horizonte.

Photographer Cesar Carneiro helped fabricate the bundles

and then documented the public's reaction, which was
intense. It was estimated that five thousand people saw
then in the Belo Horizonte Municipal Park, a popular
leisur place for the midd le and working classes. When
the t/ 1i:e and firemen came to examine th em, a pol ice
offict . ;ripped on one, Cleati ng everl mme ten sion By th e
end c' he day, the bundles were all destroyed, and th e
bones were taken to a lab fo r analysis. Almost all of
Barri./- actions took place in an ephemeral , quick, and
unexpr:cted manner, emphasizing issues of impermanence
and r''i,Jd ing to acts of urban guerrilla warfare .''"'

Barri : as not the only artist at the exhib ition to employ

symb •is of death as a means of examining political
issu e ~. in fact, the exhibition From the Body to the Earth
wa s 1,.1arked throughout by trenchant references to th e
Brazil ian dictatorship. Cildo Meireles, for example,
bu rn ed live chickens to draw a parallel to the torture and
killi nr., of political prisoners, provoking indignation and i\rtur B~rrio, Tt,J/1.\as [nsanyt:cn!ada.l . SITUII9.·1U (D.'L"J, i) Bundles SITU-iT/ON ).
outrage from politicians. Rio de Janeiro. Brazil, 1969

109

Cildo Meireles, 0 Sermao da Montanha. Fiat Lux(The Sermon on the Mount Let There Be Light). Centro Cultural Candido Mendes.
lpanema, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1973/1979
Meireles's installation Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to
the Political Prisoner, (Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento
para o Prisioneiro Politico, 1970), consisted of a vertical
wooden stake, approximately eight feet tall, bearing a
clinical thermometer on top. Ten live hens were tied to
the stake, gasoline was poured on them, and they were
set on fire. The hens were burned alive in a cruel ritual
representing the torture and death of political prisoners.
In Tiradentes, Meireles also made a parallel between
the politica l situation in Brazil at the time and conditions
during colonial times. The artist referred to the martyr of
Brazilian independence, Joaquim Jose do Si lva Xavier,
known as Tiradentes-"teeth-puller"-who was also a
dentist. After being accused of being the leader of the
conspiracy movement against the crown, Tiradentes was
J J()
I
1
J
I
I
1
I
hanged by the Portuguese on April2 1, 1792. Hi s Xij r
was dismember-ed, and his severed head was disph: :J
in the main square of Ouro Preto, in Minas Gerai s :t: 8
city where Tiradenies lived). J
The date of Meireles's action was April 21, a national
holiday ce lebrating the lnconfidencia Min eira, o f '?)'
rebellion which led to Brazil's independence frc m
Portugal in 1789. Tiradentes became a national hem CI S
a result of the rebellion. However, the mil itary regi me of
1970 was trying to co-opt this patriotic holiday through J
their sponsorship of the exhibition on this date. According
to Meireles, "The figure of Tiradentes was being used by
the military regime in a very cynical way. He represented I
the antithesis of wha t they stood for ... Of course, the
hypocrisy of their symbol ic maneuvers was clear anci i
Tunga, pict1Jred lett Pente(Comb). 1984-1997, pictured right Xip6fagas capilares(Capillary Siamese Twins). January 31. 2008. El Museo del Barrio, New York City, US
decid J to make a work about this."77 Meireles's aim wa s
to evo~ e the past through Tiradentes's ordeal in order· to
call attentio n to the repressive situation of the present. He
used memory not to bring to the present some historical
fact long forgotten , but rather as an instigation to action.
Metap' ,. ,. and political messag es were also present
in the "-rJ mps created by Thereza Simoes, carrying
inscri1:-;;,_,;ls such as Dirty, Verboten , Fragile, and Act
Silently ('he last, a slogan borrowed from Malcolm X) .
Simoes said that she "wa nted to create a disturbing
situati on '' by comparing the Brazilian military's actions to
the American war in Vietnam. 2s Lee Jaffe executed a work
origi nally conceived by Oiticica for the exhibition. His
piece consisted of sugar strewn over a dirt road . Before
ants could devour the sugar, the work was destroyed by
a tractor..Y Luis Alphonsus Guimaraes used napalm, then
employed as a wea pon by the U.S . in Vietnam, to burn
and destroy a fifteen-meter banner laid over the grass.
The climate of fear and terror instilled by the military
regime was emblematized by Cildo Meireles's piece, The
Sermon on the Mount: Let There Be Light (0 Sermoo do
Montanha: Fiat Lux, 1973- 1979), Meireles conceived
the project in 1973 but it took six years to real ize. The
installation finally took place in a small university ga llery,
Candido Mendes, in the affluent neighborhood of
lpanema in Rio de Janeiro in 1979, the same year that
amnesty was granted in Brazil to pol itical opponents of
the regime . The Sermon on the Mount was a display of
126,000 matchboxes bearing th e brand name "Fiat-
Lux"-the most popular brand of matches in Brazil. The
111
 matchboxes were stacked in a large cube in the center
of the gallery. When entering the exhibition, the
spectator felt his feet scratching the black sandpaper that
covered the floor, mimicking the sound of striking a
spark, and generating apprehension of a potential fire.
The sculpture was surrounded by five actors dressed as
bodyguards in suits and dark glasses, who prevented
visitors from touching the matches or igniting an
explosion . The presence of the alleged bodyguards was
very oppressive, because they resembled undercover
agents from the political police. Mirrors ringed the walls,
amplifying the intimidating sense of surveillance.
The situation got out of control when the public actually
started touching the matchboxes . The phony security
guards ended up calling a real police patrol to evacuate
the public from the gallery. Jo The Sermon on the Mount:
Let There Be Light was supposed to last twenty-four
hours, but only lasted a few. From the transformation of
the space into a blatant fire hazard, to the threat of a
possible explosion of the gallery, to the aggressive
presence of the phony security guards-everything in
this performance worked as a metaphor for the anxieties
that Brazilian society was experiencing at the time.
In 1985, Brazil entered a new democratic phase, leaving
behind the state of terror and violence that characterized
the period under the military regime. An artist from
the young er generation, Tunga, continued exploring th e
possibilities of performance art in a more poetic, playful,
and imaginative way. His work can be related to the
psychoanalytical implications of Lygia Clark's sensoria l
experiences. In Tunga's performance Capillary Siamese
Twins (Xifopagas Capilares), first carried out in 1985,
thirteen-year-old female twins are joined together by
a long, tangled blonde wig. These pathological twins
look identical and symmetrical, but they are not.
Tunga 's piece functions as an analogy to th e world
of representation, where signified and signifier are not
the same. Placed together, these dreamlike images
evoke different symbolic meanings, never hold ing to a
fi xed idea or narrative. Tunga's work celebrates the flu x
of transformation, and constantly shifts between modes
of sed uction and prohibition, totem and taboo 3t
1
The series of performances, street actions, and interactive ]
experiments that dominated Brazilian art of this period
range from the engagement of the artists' own body
(Manuel) to featuring the viewers' body as the recipien t of
l
the experience (Oiticica, Clark, Pope), to the emphasis
on the visceral materiality of objects (Barrio), or the use of
]
the object as a mere facilitator for experience (Clark).
Whether sacrificing animals to denounce a state of torture
(Meireles), engaging in street actions to expose violence
1
(Barrio) , or playing upon our imagination (Tunga) , all of
these artists were a liberating force that helped shape an 1
invigorating and stimulating field of performance 1n
Brazi l. As Oiticica said: "By Adversity We Live!" J

I
1 Th e exhibition Opinioo 651o0k plocc from August 12 lo September 12 , 1965, at Museu de Arle Moderna , Ri o de Janeiro.
2 Helio Oilicica, "Anoto<;:oes sobre o Parangole" ( Notes on the Parongole ) was written by the arti st and circulated in a mimeograph form a' -•
the occasion of the exhibition Opinioo 65 (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arle Moderno, 1965). Reprinted in Aspiro ao grande labirinlo, Luci or. '
J
Figueiredo, Lygio Pope, and Woly Solomao, eds (Rio de Janei ro Editoro Rocco, 1986). 70-72. Printed in Eng lish in Helio Oilicica, exh. cr·t
(Rotterdam Witted With, Center for Contemporary Art, 1992). 93-96. Reprinted in Mari Carmen Ramirez, ed. , Helio Oilicica The Body ( ·
Co/or, exh cot. (Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, 2007). 298. J
3 Frederico Morais, ed , Opinioo 65, exh. cot. (Rio de Janeiro Golerio de Arle Bonerj, 1985) This catalogue was published on the occasion of II '•
remake of the exhibition Opinioo 65 ol Go ieria de Arte Boneq in Rio de Janeiro (August 1985) lo celebrate its 20th anniversary. This exhibit:·JI,
was organized by the critic Frederico Morais. Another revi val of Opinioo 65 •Nos organ ized by the critics Wilson Coulinho and Cristina Arog!
at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (May 17 -July 16, 199 5) lo commemorate the th irtieth year of the orig inal exhi bition.
1
4 Oi ticico's penetrable, Tropicalio (1967) consists of two wooden cabins, called penelravPis (penetrobles). filled in and surrounded by gro 1: l,
sand, tropica l plants, live parrots inside a c<Jge, poems, cu rtain> made of colorful plastic fabric and carpels, all of which ore reminiscent of space"
from Rio de Janeiro's shantytowns. The main structure invites the participant in to a dark, labyrinth-like passage at th e end of which is a b l ac~ ­
ond-while television turned on. The second penetrable is on open structure containi ng the inscription "Purezo e um milo" ("Purity is a Myth ").
5 Edi tor's Note: The word "oterro" is ambivalent. It may refer to a "portion of land" or a "mound, " and may also refer to "terror". J
6 Frederico Morais, Cronolog ia dos aries plaslicos no Rio de Janeiro, 1816-1994 (Rio de Janeiro Top Books, 1995). 301.
7 Ibid. The nome Apocalipopolese was suggested by the poet Rogerio Duarte.
J
112
J
 Helio Oiticica, "Apocalipop6tese, " in Figueiredo, Pope, and Salomao, eds., Aspiro ao grande labirinlo, 128-139. This book is a selection of
8
texts written by OilicJca between 1954 and 1969.

9 Morais, Cronologia, 301.

Antonio Manuel's Urnas Ouenles (Hot Ballot Box) was mentioned by Oiticica in "Apocalipop6tese," 128.
10
The first time Oiticica mentioned Parangole P22 Cape 18 Nirvana in collaboration with Antonio Manuel was in the catalogue for his exhibition
11
Whitechapel Experiment which took place at the Wh 1techapel Art Gallery 1n London 1n 1969.
Lygia Pope (Rio de Janeiro: Fu~arte, 1983), 46. For further discussion of Lygia Pope's The Eq,g (0 Ovo), _1 968, see Helio Oiticica, " E~g," Lygia Pope
12
Govea de Tocaia, exh. cat. (Sao Paulo: Cosac & Na1fy, 2000), 30 1-303; and Guy Brett, L1fe Strateg1es Overv1ew and Selection, Out of Act10ns:
Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, Russell Ferguson, ed., exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 208.
Lucia Carneiro and Ileana Pradilla , Antonio Manuel, Palavra de Arlisla (Rio de Janeiro, Lacerda Editora, 1999), 39.
13
4 Marcel Duchamp subm itted a urinal entitled Fountain to the American Society of Independent Artists' first exhibition (New York, April191 7)
1
under the pseudonym, "R. Mutt."
15 Antonio Ma nuel Interview by author, August 22, 2002, Rio de Janeiro

16 Published in the Sunday's Arts & Leisure section of th e newspaper 0 Jamal (Rio de Janeiro) on the occasion of Exposic;:ao de Antonio Manuel.
as
de Zero 24 Horas (Exhibition of Antonio Manuel: From Zero to 24 Hours) 15 July 1973, 2. This was an interview given by the critic Mario
Pedrosa to J1ntonio Manuel, Hugo Denizart, and Alex Varela in Pedrosa's home right after Manuel took off his clothes at the open ing of the XIX
Salon of fv1odern Art at MAM-RJ, May 1970. The interview was transcribed from a tape recording The expression used by Pedrosa, "The
experimenta l exercise of freedom," became symbolic of spontaneous artistic acts against censorship and repression.
17 Mario Pedroso, "The Biennial from Here to There," ("A Bienal de Ca Para La"). (Th is essay was originally written by Pedrosa in February, 1970
(Cabo Frio: Rio de Jan;_iro) and publishe?. in Ferreira Gullar~ Arte Brasileira, Hoje (Rio d: Janeiro Paz e Terra, 1973), 1-64. Later republished
in Mario Pedrosa: Poht1ca das Aries, Oid ia Arantes, ed. (Sao Paulo Un1vers1dade de Sao Paulo, 1995), 283-284
18 See Rina Carvajal, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom, exh. cal. (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 35-36.
19 Michel F.;ucoult, Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York Panthe on Books, 1975), 25.
20 Ibid.
21 Helio Oiticica, "Esquema Geral do Nova Objetividade" was first published in Novo Objelividade Brasileira, exh. ca t (Rio de Janeiro Museu
de Arte Moderna, 1967). Republished in Helio Oilicica, exh. cal. (Rotterdam: Witte de With, 1993), 110-120. Excerpted in Conceptual Art
0 Critical Anthology, Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 40-42.

22 Fl6vio de Carval ho had a column in the newspaper Diorio de Sao Paulo from March to October 1956 in which he discussed fashion-related
issues. See Luiz Cami llo Osorio, Flavia de Carvalho (Sao Paulo: Cosac & Naify Edi~oes , 2000), 43- 44.
23 Lygia Clark, Livro-Obra (Rio de Janeiro, 1983). Reprinted in Lygio Clark, exh cat. (Barcelona Fundaci6 Antoni To pies, 1998), 151 - 52, and
in October The Second Decade, 1986- 1996 (Cambridge, Mass MIT Press, 1997), 39.
24 See Lygia Clark .· do obra ao aconlecimento. Somas o molde A voce cabe o sop10. Suely Rolnik and Corinne Diserens, org., exh. cat. (Nantes:
Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005, Sao Paulo Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, 2006).
25 From the Body to the Earth (Do Corpo aTerra) was a five-day event curated by Frederico Mora is at the Municipal Pork in Belo Horizonte, Minas
Gerc: '' 1 ' r,,.jJ 17-21, 1970). No catalogue was published The exhibition was sponsored by a hyd roelectric company, Hidrominas, who>e major
sharent l:ier wa s the state of Minas Gerais. All the artists invited to participate had an offici al letter from th e government granting them freedom
to excr_, '" their works in thi s public space . See Frederico Morais, Do Corpo a Terra um Marco Radical no Arte Brasileiro (Bela Horizonte: ltau
(o_dtur· .' ':JJ02), n.p
26 Clauci' J r:a:rrman, "Artur Barrio: Ephemeral Art and Decomposing Material s, Arlur Barrio: Actions After Actions, e>h . cat. (Philadelphia : Moore
Coll eJ~ .,f Art & Design 2007), 22-29.

27 Gerardo .Mosquero, Paulo Herkenhoff, and Dan Cameron, eds., "Gerardo Mosquera in Conversation with Cilclo Meireles," Cildo Meireles,
exh . cot (London Pha idon Press, 1999), 15.
28 Stolem( rt by Therezo Simoes in Depoimenlo de umo gero~oo 196 9- 1970, exh. cot. Frr>cl riw Morai s, ed (Rio de Janei ro Ga leria de Ar tc
Boner!, 1986), n.p.
29 Morai ,, Do Corpo aTerra, n.p.
30 Cildo 10. reles. Interview by author, August 7, 2002 , Rio de Janei ro
31 Claudio Calirman, "Tunga, " Art in America, No. 5 (May 2007), 194- 193.

113
 An Art of Nooks: Notes on Non-Objectual Experiences in Venezuela
Gabriela Rangel
For Adriano, In Memoriam
I. From the (Museum's) Back Room
Twenty years have gone by between the two moments
that created an uncertain place for non-objectuaiJ art
and conceptual forms in Venezuela, diluting their history
and increasing the eccentric nature of these practices in
the Venezuelan discourse on contemporary visual arts.
The first was a happening entitled, Homage to Schmaltz
(Homenaie a Ia Cursilerla) organized in 1961 by the
Neo-Dada group El Techo de Ia Bollen a (The Roof of the
Whale) and the second, in 1980, consisted of seven
performances by Marco Antonio Ettedgui in the
conceptual/ experimental art space the artist called
Arteologla. Both events were held in garages located in
different places in Caracas. The first one, a corrosive
political satire against the status quo, was staged in the
shed of a private residence in the Conde neighborhood,
gathering a coterie of the cultural left-wingers of the
capital. In contrast, Ettedgui's events took place at the
Araya Lamp Shop in Las Mercedes, an upper middle
class neighborhood. They attracted hundreds of viewers
from Caracas, who perhaps attended out of curiosity
about this new type of emerging art or were simply
mobilized by the young artist's charisma.
The time that elapsed between these two events, their
ideological bipolar drive, and their contentious nature
seem to converge diachronically in a sing le place:
from the dark space of the nooks and the back room, as
the artist Marco Antonio Ettedgui noted. This essay
examines a group of actions and performances
that have been obliter·a ted from official Venezuelan
historiography, which has been dominated since the
1960s by a formalist model initiated by Alfredo Boulton.
Such a model projects itself into the present, rejecting
the legitimacy of body art and performance as hybrid
phenomena constitutive of postmodernism in that they
subvert the idea that the formal structure of the artwork,
cut off from its context, contains a stable meaning.: Ariel
Jimenez has argued that the history written by Boulton
Marco Antonio Ettedgui. H1gienc COJpOJa! Mens sana in Corpore Sana (Even to !nfom.,,!)
(Co1poral Hygiene A Sound Mind. A Sound Body, informal Event). Caracas. Venezuela, March 8. 1'.': :1
114
"ends up being conflated (due, in part, to the absence of
a historiography that would encompass and comprehend
the younger generations), the non-pictoriai"J tend encies
of the 1960s and 1970s. It is worth recalling here an
observation by Marla Elena Ramos : "If the aesth etic
formal, and linguistic concerns were very important t~
the modernists, performance art in Venezuela, like in the
rest of Latin America, has a marked critical interest in
social, idiosyncratic, and political processes."4
If, in principle, we attempt to situate happe nings,
performances, and actions using historical milestones
where criticism has gathered the production of events
and the most important works of non-objectual arl, we
believe that these only have the practical function of
providing factual elements for an initial hypothesi s for
this text: in contrast to the critical attention these forms
have garnered in the U.S ., Europe, and the Southern
Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Brazil), in Venezuel a, non-
objectual art has been (and continues to be) systematically
excluded from the visual discourse, thereby confining th is
production to a footnote. Noting this historiog ra ph ic
tendency to distort the facts, Juan Calzadilla warned th at:
"Seg regation thus facilitates the issuing of a perpetually
temporary I.D. card [... ].The assumption that a wo rk of
visual art is only that which is circumscribed to mater-ial a
object (whether fixed or mobile) in space, but in rmy
case, determined by a structure external to the arti t, hcs
led the publ ic, as well as artists and critics, to r _ cd
manifestations of body art as a part of institutionu i··- ·d
visual arts movements [... ]. "s
It is not accidental that the intermittent public revival s of
non-objectual events, actions, and situations from :: "
1960s to the present took place in the hall of ; '-,:~
Mendoza Foundation , Librerla Cruz del Sur, Sal a 0 :• ~ ~
Galerla Angel Boscan , Salon Arturo Michelena, Aten.::J
de Caracas, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo of
Caracas, the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Francisco
Narvaez de Porlamar, Sola de Gobernaci6n de
Caracas, the project room at the Galerla de Arte Nacional
 (GAN) and at Teatro Juana Sujo, all non-conventional
spaces run by artists or museums that were occasionally
open to experimental work beyond painting or
sculpture. 6 Conceptual art has also been condem ned
either to oblivion or to the oral history recounted by its
protagonists . Another feature that highlights the hybrid
nature of non-objectual art is its organic alliance with
theater, dance, music, and film, thereby producing
multidisciplinary collaborations that situate it outside the
field of the museum and outside the aesthetic field
defined by Boulton's teleological paradigm .

Yet, despite the difficulty of locating happe nin gs,

Rolando Peiia and the Foundation for the Totality,
The Paella-Bicvcle- Totaiity-Crucifi1ion. East Hampton. i~Y. U.S .
September 1967
performances, and actions in institutional spaces,
whether public or private, and given the radical nature
of their proposals or the instability of alternative ci rcuits
where they were occasionally shown, there are
still significant productions of works and exhi bits in
Venezuela ranging from the proto-happening s of El
Techo de Ia Ballena, to the pioneer happen ings by
Rolando Peiia, the early performances by Diego
Barboza , Antonieta Sosa, Claudio Perna , Angel Vivas
Arias, and Pedro Teran, the multidisciplinary show
Image of Caracas (Imagen de Caracas) ,? the events by
Yeni and Nan, Marco Antonio Ettedgui, Carlos Zerpa
and Juan Loyola, and the most conceptual actions
proposed by Alfred Wenemoser. This body of works,
produced over the course of four decades, and
subsequently reduced to a footnote, is part of a dense
and complex discourse which reflects the contrad ictic .s
of a country where the modernization process entn ;jed
"one of th e most violent changes in Latin America, wh rc h
practically split history in two separate per·iods, arci1i vtod
th e past and without a solid educational base, l~; c,pt
forward to the conquest of modernity. The predicto hie J
effect was the derangement of values, the pa rt ia l
destruction of inherited ones, and the impossibil ity to
articulate new and coherent ones, especially ir1 he
context of a bourgeois society whose leading members
become rich in ten times less time than in th e 19th
century European bourgeois models ."B

In different approaches to this topic, some have argued

that the most intense period for non-objectual art (wh ich
also had the most official support) happened in the 1980s
as is seen in the exhibitions: Biped Art (Arte 8/pedo,

116
 GAN, 1980), the Venezuelan selection for the XVI It may thus be asked why the most significant production
Bienal de Sao Paulo (1981) and Actions Before the of happenings, performances, and actions clusters around
Plaza (Acciones frente a Ia plaza, FUNDARTE, 1981 ).9 the beginning of the 1980s, the most conformist period in
Nevertheless, the facts reveal the weakness of this
con struct when it becomes evident that these practices,
even du ring the said period, did not receive the
systematic support of national museums, the commitment
of private collectors, or the interest of local art galleries.Jo
Still, th is mere formulation shows that in the beginning of
the 1980s, non-objectual arts, in effect, had one of their
most vibrant moments in the country. 11Nevertheless, the
] history of these practices cannot limit itself to events or
situations that gather an important number of works into
a single movement, but should also include scattered
actions or events that have contributed to the construction
of a decentered visual discourse which is also eccentric
in relation to the modern paradigm.
Thi s is the case for Image of Caracas, a multidisciplinary
eveni conceived between 1966 and 1968 by th e painter
Jacob Borges. This happening constituted an exceptional
experi·nent, rarely mentioned as a prelude to contemporary
Ve nP.~_ J e lan art, developed over the course of the 1970s
in thr conceptualist proposals by Claudio Perna , Hector
-J Fuenmayor, Maria Zabala, William Stone, Eugenio
Espinoza, the emergent art salon Eleven Guys (Once
Tipos ) and experiments that explored the relations
betwc n audience, artist, and daily life. Among the
latter, Tlte Bus (EI Autobus) or Man's Lost Sensations (Las
sens" ·."Jnes perdidas del hombre) are wo rth mentioning.
In th r'ecade of the 1970s, Margarita D'Amico had
~d exhibits in which the happening and th e
1
pro
perL, ,,o nce had become single-chan nel, non-narrative
vid ec. ,,ieces that combined actions and live music with
pre-rf. :orded or feedback video images presented at
Festiv·_J of Video Art in th e newly-created Museo de Arte
Conieriiporaneo de Caracas (197 5). Th e group show 20
Ven E,.c•Jc.lan Artists Today (20 Artistas Venezolanos Hoy)
was I,Jc at Centro de Arte y Comunicaci6n de Buenos
Aire (CAYC, 1979) and th e Video Exhibition at the
Cara,·as Festival (Muestra de Video at Festival de Caracas,
Univer. idad Central de Venezuela, 1979). These pioneer
experim ents showed the close collaboration between
super-eig ht filmmakers such as Carlos Castillo and Diego
Ris~ '' ··· cmd exper·i menta l theater· mtists and actor·s .
Venezuelan history and the beginning of the first economic
crisis that the country experienced since the 1930s.
The indifference that art in stitutions showed in Venezuela
to these practices is evidenced in the dispersion of
archives and documen tal sources that preserve th e
memory of works and si tuations, jeopardizing th eir
survival. The marginal nature of non-objectual art
becomes more obvious in the erratic careers of the artists
that were active in the country since the 1960s. Their
dedication to this ephemeral, non-commercial art which
explores the limits of subj ectivity using the body,1 2
popular rituals, and the fu sion with the real, has confined
and cu lturally isolated them . Also, the untimely death of
some of the pioneers of happeni ngs and performance
art caused the irreversible loss of great part of the history
of the actions that these artists performed both in
Venezuela as in Europe or th e U.S . In this context, th e
documentation of actions by Diego Barboza, Alberto
Brandt, Carlos Contramaestre, Marco Anton io Ettedgui ,
Juan Loyo la, Claudio Perna , and Angel Vivas Arias was
not acquired by the national museums, nor did it have
public support in order to guarantee its accessibility to
the public or its conservation for th e future.
While abstract, Kinetic, and Op art have spawned a
critic al corpus over the last four decades, in the case of
non-objectua l and conceptual art th ere is no discou rse
that could inscribe them in a wider context or establish
a comparative framework with regional experim ents, as
in the case of happen ings and performances in
Argentina, Chile, and Brazil in the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s. JJ Th e development of these art forms in Venezuela
also coincided with the emergence of a new generation
of critics and curators among wh ich are Margmila
D'Amico, Roberto Guevara, Maria Elena Ramos, Elso
Flores, Juan Calzadilla, Luis A. Duque, Alejand ro Vmderi ,
and Juan Carlos Palenzuela , who interpreted these
ephemeral works in the context of their appearance in
articles and critical essays published in the Venezuelan
press.J 4 Nevertheless, th e lack of specialized publications
or consistent periodizations has hindered the reception
of Venezuelan non-objectual and concep tu al ad in
117
 recent studies and publications in the U.S., Europe,
and Latin America, where these practices have been
recontextualized and projected on a global scene of
conceptual art and feminism . Is
This essay does not attempt to give an exhaustive
account of non-objectual art in Venezuela, but rather
aims at reconsidering a group of works that founded
eccentric practices, most of which are critical of the
process of modernization. They do not necessarily trace
a linear progression or follow the predetermined scheme
of the European avant-garde from Bauhaus, Dada,
and surrealism, to their receptions at Black Mountain
College, thus defining a genealogy of performance
from aU. S. perspective. J6
In Venezuela, happen ings, performances and actions
appear and disappear from and in vernacular "nooks,"
lagging behind the great modernizing myth that hides
the demographic explos ion , the migration from th e
countryside to the urban areas, and the parallel
"favelization" of the city, illiteracy, the informal economy,
and postponed social struggles. All these phenomena
are present in a country where, since the death of the
dictator Juan Vicente Gomez in 1936 to the consolidation
of democracy in 1958, the processes have been
disproportionately accelerated by oil wealth.
II . Not Works, Experiences
Homage to Schmaltz (Homenaie a Ia cursilerla, 196 1)
by the group El Techo de Ia Ballena was the first
happening in Venezuela. 11 This group, whose members
Vv'el"e emerg ing visual artists and writers who believed in
the renovation of letters and art, violently erupted onto the
Venezuelan cultural scene as the symptom of a turbulent
historical period. This era was characterized by the
consolidation of a brand-new democracy soon threatened
by the penetration of guerrillas spread through out Latin
America by the Cuban revolution, which began the last
year of the developmentalist dictatorship of Marcos Perez
Jimenez (1950 - 1958). Being a world oil producer and
thus a strategic country for U.S. economic and political
interests during the Cold War, Venezuela, in the early
1960s, was beginning to strengthen its constitutional
bipartisan model, which had been criticized from its
118
inception by many left-wing sectors of the country.1 s
During those years of struggle between various social
forces and political actors, geometrical abstracti on
began to consolidate itself as a canonical movement of
Venezuelan art following the "Proyecto de lntegraci6n
de las Aries," in the Central University of Venezuela by
the architect Carlos Raul Villanueva . Later the same
happened to Op art thanks to the international success of
Jesus Solo and Carlos Cruz Diez. The work of promotion
and exposure of modern European art, and Ameri can
and Latin American art, was taken up by Museo de
Bellas Aries, directed by the critic Miguel Arroyo, l9 an
ex member of the group Los Disidentes, 2o later on
continued by Sofia lmber. 2J Jesus Solo, who then lived in
Paris, showed his sympathies to Art lnformel in that early 1
period by participating in the controversial exhibit Living
Spaces (Espacios Vivientes), organized by ex mem bers
of the group Sardio, which regrouped into El Techo de Ia
Ballena, at Palacio de Bellas Aries of Maracaibo (1 960) .
This exhibit aimed at breaking the ranks of geometric 1
abstraction, complicating the binary logic and the false
dichotomies that characterized the historical debate on ]
figuration and abstraction that split Venezuelan artists and
intellectuals since the 1950s, and doing away with the
ideological distinctions that located progressive and
revolutionary art exclusively in the confines of socia l
realism and pamphleteering. 22 ]
For Angel Ramo, the violent modernization that
Vene zuela experienced could explain the criticol ]
reaction that El Techo de Ia Balleno used in its attacks
against provinc ial ha bits and the Catholic morali ty t:..:,t )
still ruled li fe in Caracas at the beginning of the 19 ~·U.
Co nce ived as a deliberate provocation, the gr, ·':J
. thought ahead and advertised th eir first manifesto, whic.i1 J
did not attempt to revive the soirees at the Ca baret
Voltaire .=1 This early happening constituted an experi mer1 t J
that tested the li mits of th e modern notion of au thorship
since it was conceived and presented as a coll ective
action aimed at joining art with reality. Homage to
Schmaltz presented a huge collage made up of excerpts
from canonical Venezuelan writers, press clipping s wiir J
news and photogr·aphs of high-level politicians like
wallpaper covering the walls of a room and whose
fragments were read by members of the group while
they offered the public platters of" edible art" served by
 Alberto Bra ndt. 24 A year later, the public appeal of this
happeni ng was topped by a more ambitious proiect,
Homage to Necrophilia (EI Homenaie a Ia Necrofilia),
whi ch managed to stir up public opinion in Caracas with
a "set" by Carlos Contramaestre containing works made
with animal corpses and entrails, which began to
decompose as time went by, forcing the Ministry of
Publ ic Hea lth to shut it down.
El Techo de Ia Ballena, active from 1960 to 1968,
coi nci ded with the second phase of intensive
modern ization after the Perez Jimenez dictatorship,
whi ch included education reform, the construction of
low-income housing, and expensive public and private
infra ·tru d ure. Still, in this period, the political climate
wa s stirred by ideological divisions in Acci6n
l Democr6 tica, the governing party between 1959 and
196'. , and by various military insurgencies, strikes, and
the assa ssination attempt against President R6mulo
Betan,:ourt at the beginning of the 1960s. These dramatic
events shaped the profile of the intellectual groupings
that emerged around magazines such as Sardio, Tabla
Redondo, and Cal. By contrast, El Techo de Ia Ballena
was a literary and visual movement in equal proportions,
and defined its tactics as cultural guerrilla warfare
in a period of extreme military repression due to the
appearance of Fuerzas Revolucionarias de Liberaci6n
Nacional, an armed faction of the Venezuelan Communist
Party proscribed for its support of guerrilla activity. The
experi rnen tal aspirations of El Techo de La Ballena, their
eq uo! irm between avant-garde action and thought that
distil! ' ' •ished them from the militant left-wing of the
196 were so notorious that the writer Caopolic6n
OvoiL., was pursued by the police for publishing an
infla:nmatory poem, "Are You Asleep, Mr. President2"
("a Du: rme Usted, Senor Presidente?"). Ovalles had to
I flee J, ,_olomb ia where he remained clandestine, and
AdriCJ .u Gonza lez de Leon was arrested for wri ting the
11 forev · . d to the book. Indeed, El Techo de Ia Ballena's
mili!a;' :y in armed struggle predates the experiments
wi th nt and politics such as that of Tucuman Arde
(Ro sar io, Argentina, 1968). 25 The left-wing artists
affil i ~ed with the Venezuelan Communist Party gathered
around Tab la Redondo, in turn, as Angel Ramo has
shown,26 were conservatively linked to the realist models
of r,. . 19 nda art and litera tur·e.
10 <iURSl ES CURSI ~ HISE Ell SCElffi DE RRll10CEROS = TODA MESA REDO:IDK
ES IJURSI • TODO I'ROTOCOLO llS CORSI = TODO HOBB! ES OURS! • OURS! II
HAY QUE QU1'!Wl llL AVILA? !ll Anln es culpable;
1- de unn met o:rt. i nfeliz de Per~~ Bcnclde
2- de TODJt l u pin~ de N.:.nuel Oubr~
~ - de ttna nef.... s t~ l ite1-ct~ contra l u llt.c::.
~- de c•lilllc :tr a ae curei £1 1118 ae l o do lr. t <ll'de
'5- de oior toa s:!mbolos de Pedr o Centeno Vallenillr.
C0li3Ectl};J!O IA LANEL<r.\J:ILE• HAY SUE gUEP!All EL A'il"LA
1- loa que ae oie!t Gan complr-decidoo \'iendo eoto. eXJ)osioi6n
2- los ~uoho a oue oo oreen ol vidcdo~ en alln
3- loo numr oaos que se sentir<i.'l acl;udidos (aun cuando no aludido s)
'+- l oa muohos que ee so.ben l nc!'pnoe de figuror
E"TO ESTA .DE ESJ>ANTO 6 l!OOOO?
W CURS! ES CIJRSI <NOOO? ENTONCES TODO VISJTA1'1TE DEBE BXPOh!:RSE
AQUT HAl QH1 OOII'l'R!llU.ill AI EIIGRA.l!llEOIHIElUO l'ATRIO 1!AZ PROF!
LillA COLIJ!ORA COlT IIOS~N!OS Y ESTAJIAS HACII!l!DO VENEZUELA ;,liDN?
tru :noo;;s r ffilllA s CUR 1
Qtterielldo ayudar ;La labor de discernim1ento (jal pdblico, cita-
m.oa a oontinUilOtrln alg)l!las o o s a a fl!'t alll\enj;e ourais:
Lfl ptJ)a de r6mulo lleth.s ncourt y au pe:r:rito y sue disoureo y
sus de aayunQa y los nW!az (aun. otwfdo el alq\Uler no es cur& )
l os ojelee de Jlnf~el Caldera ( 0Una oierta aonrillll
l a p\lrp\>Xa del cardenul E!l!intoro y Sits telegramne a 12.
c~iolla?)
prena (t,au pintura1 o me jor 1.Su• &'l.eos? )
l as corbetas de JU2J1 Lieoano ( .;su poes!a1 leu camel t W fitHA?
LAS C:o!ON!G,A8 DEli LEOl1 DE XL..110MBR.\.
Las encuestas de Rafael 1'i !leda - ·TODA LA l'Dimll.RA
t os t~ -ca!msta y. los oai~ -bridge a b~nefioi o de loB nl.lioa
])l'J C!JlRR
lp o b r e al TO.Da OAR IDJ.D C.'\RIDAD ES CUR8l •
Los :pensamient oa ae Ceoill.9 noost a, 1!18 o~;ras completes de ·
Andr<l a Bello , l]l5 ffil ATE!lEO OURS!? ILQs .coneejos de LeQllOl'
de Brandt y loa des-nu"<los de Pedro Centeno V, Ia s fl ores
son para llll.rarl a s, J?el'o z,oMnao las pi.l;lta r.tpB!i Hendea11 11
!fay ollrJJie que s on oill)patiooe. ,Hey curGi~er!as meYit ables
l us po1emioaa entre plittores y ·p el'iodiet eal l llS poliliiiicae
entre· '[>Ol,.! tioos aerl.os y l acayoa de :C!U!oiller:!a I TODD AG!I!O
DE l'RIJI10COLO. ES CUR'Sl 0!10? Jlas ~sitae de grt'.ndee evcrftores
a peiaea eu\ld.es!l.l'rbll<ldos, nun.que el eeqr!tor venga d~ Jli!BO
en .r:Us16n •• • lcursi l Lb CURSl ES 10- OUR$I 1 ES ASI
EL AVIIo!r TAll UAS:III GADO POR IDS IDl!CENlliGS I.-0 ll,l SDJO Mji.S POR
OIERTAS l'AIJ!!fAS A PROl'Opi!N HAC.EI!OS OIJ!RTAS OllSmVAOioNES
oES CURS! UN (l{)RJIT? SI I) !10 iJ QUE
SS~AIH J..,.ii Ui1J. FRCl;:i.'L'RR ..;liTRE !.0 ~URSI Y Lv r· VOSO, cin ~~ <.1
.rH.iculo intt,.nret' u 1 es ll!ld. !lm •X'E:&: ~ b.:1nt ...nte probl eGiticr... !.: o ...,;.-
b\.:Qo. h.:ntu. qu.~ puntc 1. ... fortun.- .nor~ ...ovmpa.!"\:.do . Fzt. todo 'J .:.C· ,
en nin.~Un ...0~11tc hemos prP tendi do eat r.hlecerla; supone~C3 <)'..Uj Cl
•- he h , opu.l. ·, a:>bq; t~l't!inos, him lle($i,do ,, ener.:Jbl!.l'Se de "' .-
ne-ri.. w\\). au-ril. S::::.beaon, ~in e-mberaot qUe hay 0{.. ;;.e -:r p rnon x -
:.ztt:vltJ.bla.oonte t~u.:rs.it~ que i:lc....nz.M lC!. oc:tcgori;.. de ... :r~woa:: - f.· i~
te·to que en aete ~: ! o • cit~ G!J) ta se diecut<: , y ea :oereee, por .t,,,
p .rte . &-;.be.!Zio::s tt!.mbi~n que no tcdo lo pavoec e's cttrei y '1!.16 no !:..-
c:lcenh lo cursi o l o p;,yoso ""- a!:lphzen su el reino del lug.,. oo-
l!l\ln, De todao m.mere · , no eo dif!a 1 u'oJ.oar eSI. G t r ee on;egor! > en
e_ dominio del ridicule .
S1 an e stu expoeici6n - q e de .mtecn110 <Olbaeoe def1oiente r pur~
cO!il.pletcr l l'. nos hubieee s-ido necesar1o inol\Ur en ellr. gron .;.rte
de nu.eetn hi stor1~ y de l o ue t e ha dado por lllllllSl' nu&s~o s
VALORES CGNSAGRA:DO hemoe 1owdo co!lfundir """ diferenoino16u ,
ee declr, que lo our•i se hegc Wl<l extenoion de lc pave o, roz;mdc
muy de pc.so el lugur comdn, con idel·!>rer.>O que h bremoe logl'<ldo un
cbjetiv·o :oey prl.!lordi l , Jl'leP, si bien t odo lc pcvoso no es ourei,
todo lo ctu•a! ee f't.\':'OBO y, es hont? to, hooerlo del oonocitident o
publico (Jililtrio ) as esenci • Gonvel' tir a l to cur.aileri~ on u.nr.
au~rte de :roz6n de estado co~.sc ante que - inooneoientemente- h.
eido f act or indeclinable e l o rgo do toda l!r hi stor!u de este
pcls (l~ ae : PA'll!lA). llc ~ · te tu:nera , y conociendo lo~ te:rminoa
m •,ejcr, t nl vez l.c aituaci6n g@lte:ral del pcia se torne m.ie
duatil y oenoa r idiculn. En este oentido deolru:r.mos que nueetr~ ~x­
po 3ioi:ln ee eet ri ctci!aente vern6cuh, ansi tolkl6r icn, per no decu
Upica . ilLcecoa, en oonsecuenci , d~l relte!'lillo y opor t uno lena
V"r::liEZlJBU l'l!U®O unn coMigna util:!sl.l;(!.
t'nfin, ®O ~ato •e sepn< nqu!, on Venezualc., n::die hu eido i nocen-
te de hnber aide curai . E L T E C H 0 D E L A B A Ir L B A
Alberto Brandt. El Techo de Ia Ballena, original man1festo.
/lemrmaju a Ia wrsi!ettil [1/om.Jge tu Schmaltz). f:<J1 ,lt:Jo, Vcill!LuciJ. Jur1c 19G 1
119
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J
Jacobo Borges (artistic director).lnocente Palacios (producer), Imagen de Caracas (Image of Caracas).
"Oispositivo Ciudad," Caracas. Venezuela, 1968

20
Shortly before El Techo de Ia Ballena disbanded in
1968, Jacobo Borges, who was one of the artists linked
to this group, was invited to collaborate in an homage
to th e 400th anniversary of Caracas, to be financed
by th e city's Municipal Council and produced by the
philanthropist and historian lnocente Palacios. Aher almost
three years of intense work, and following the earthquake
that shook Caracas in 1967, Borgesand a group of
colla borators from various disciplines presented Image of
Caracas, an event described by Lourdes Blanco as "a
failed cinematographic-environmental project," whose
"shimmering memory" remained in the minds of those
who witnessed it.27 This project gathered a fair number
of the debates on realism that had developed in various
facets of Venezuelan intellectual life during the 1960s.
Although Borges, a figurative painter supported by the most
important critics in Venezuela, received the commission for
this pu blic project, Image of Caracas was not simply a
visual experiment that brought together artists and experts
from vari ous disciplines. The event pushed the limits of the
notion r authorship, even in the conception of the author(s)
himself (themselves), since it shifted collective collaboration
to the public sphere, revealing the production relations
between work and time, through a complex technical
device and positing the equality between artist and
audience. a According to the "authors,"29 /mage of Caracas
was not a show loca ted on the margins of film or theater,
since it proposed a critical revision of the conventions of
both d · ~::: ipl ines in their relationship with the audience:
Th e liJ iian stage with its pits, proscenium, raked
floo., f lse perspectives, single sight-line, space for
th e audience, aisles, boxes, is now a dead
concept. All the subsid ies in the world cannot stop
its dcwnfall. The public, sensitive to great spectacles
- lib department stores, airports, factories,
demonstrations, and cinema- does not understand,
nor is it interested in, individua l dramas and th eir
theatre s (... ) We wanted a show that would be
critical of the man-city-object relation sh ip. That is
why we did not go to the stage to look for the
answer. It was on the street, at the market places .30
In an enclave in the downtown of the city, Borges and Juan
Pedro Posa ni JJ drafted a complex architectural structure
that the public entered through a side door. Once inside,
they were in the midst of a geometrical structure
resembling a futurist city spectators could walk through,
with scaffolding supported by tubes, columns, ramps,
reflectors, eight giant modular screens, and cubes
suspended from the ceiling at variable heights. Single,
simultaneous, and multiple screenings of films took place
in this space, with the action being narrated in a non-
linear form and a soundtrack composed specially for the
event. This "quasi cinema"32 had a complex set-up: eight
35mm projectors were placed in pairs on an axis
determined by four columns located in the central part
of the building and forty-five slide projectors were placed
along the length and width of the space. The public
could only perceive an overview of the event from
the circulation platforms . The complicated mechanism
accompanying the structure was regulated by a computer
that had been programmed by a physicist for the event.JJ
The black-an d-white and color images were shot by the
filmmaker Mario Robles and Borges himself, and the text
was written by Adriano Gonzalez Leon and narrated by
Salvador Garmendia (both well-known writers and
members of El Techo de Ia Ballena), and the music was
composed by the Chilean Jose Vicente Asuar, who at
the time had recently finished his musical training in
Germany and later founded an electro-acoustic music
lab. Borges and his collaborators divided the action into
a plot with two parts: the history of the conquest up until
1800, and colonial pre-republican life up until 1967.
The episodes mixed professional actors with people with
no previous experience, J4 were shot on location and had
a clear stylistic influence of Italian Neo-Realism and
Brazilian cinema novo. The final result comb ined origina l
images with clips from ethnographic films. The use of
black-and-white or color corresponded to the dramatic
conten t of each ep isode .· s The hi storica l argument
emerged from a critical interpretation of the processes
of conquest and colonization, with a stress on th e
class conflict and ideological divisions between the
protagonists. During the screenings, some of the actors
and protagonists of the films made live appearances,
which made the filmed action coincide with reality. For
instance, a young man would speed by on a motorcycle,
both on the screen as in the public space where the
audience watched the scene.
121

Antoni eta Sosa, Plataforma //(Platform II), Antoni eta So sa, Conversaci6n con Bafio de Agua Tibia (Con ersation with a Warm Bath).
Aten eo de Caracas, Caracas, Venezuela, 1969 Galerfa de Arte Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela, 1980
A month after it opened, /mage of Caracas was shut
down due to its polemical interpretation of national
history. 36 Nevertheless, the producers of the project,
members of the Municipal Council of Caracas, argued
the reason for the shutdown was the high costs involved .
Since Venezuela had a system of state philanthropy,
frequently there would be fricti on between the State and
artists, espec ially in the experimental fields of non-
objectual art. In 1969, Rafael Caldera, the conservative
founder of th e Christian Democratic Party, 37 was elected
President and shortl y after his arrival to power, he
implemented an amnesty law for the insurgents that
accepted a separation of the guerrilla wars. That same
year, Antonieta Sosa would destroy Plataforma II (Platform
11) , a 3-D work th e artist included in a one-woman show
at Ateneo de Caracas3B as protest against the official
participation of Venezuela in the Bienal de Sao Paulo.39
In her invitation to the event, Sosa responded sarcastically
to the controversial intervention by a critic4o who urged
her not to destroy an artwork that cou ld become part of
the collection of any provincial museum: "Do you know
what a happening is? I don't, but I sense it."4J The
artist had returned to the country after concluding her
tmining in California, and wa s then develop ing a series
122
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1
of 3-D geometrical pieces that embody what Peggy
Phelan , paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, has call ed "the
phenomenological contours of touch itself," works that
1
can be transformed into activated objects by the public's
participation through physical actions. 42ln this ca se, the
)
platform destroyed by Sosa was used for jum pi ng,
making evident the tension between the functio n of th e l
object and the danger in manipulating it, som eth ng
presented in many early works up to Situation Co!! d
Home (Situacion //amado coso, 1981 , Museo de 8"lh s I
Artes), where, on the opening day, viewers could hurl 'J P
to twen ty wine glasses with th e artist toward s a b re J
brick structure that alluded to marginal housi ng in
Caracas (the so-ca lled "ranchos")43 If breaki ng rm
object can be liberating and cathartic, th e action sets ·n
J
motion the destructive anatomy of the spectator i! a
possible re lation of ambivalence with th e c,,'•j ..
This corrosive underbelly of Sosa's work brings to rn1 nd
Lyg ia Clark's apprehension when she spoke of being
deflowered by the viewer.44
Sosa's political urgency when sum moning people to the
even t protesting the Bienal is comparable to th e
destruction of works carried out by avant-g a1·de orli.)t ;,1
 Buenos Aires a few months earlier at the lnstituto Torcuato
Di Tella. 45 It was in this moment that Sosa defined as a
happen ing that was destined to produce "a positive
awareness of socio-cultural problems and the enrichment
of our artistic experience." 46 Oriented towards investigating
the structural relationships between things, their functions,
and interaction with the public, Sosa's research mutated
into an introspection of her own body. This changed
contemporary dance, a disc ipline to which the artist
dedicated herself for almost six years, later returning to
the vi sua l arts and devoting herself to various facets of
pedagogy. In 1980 in Conversation with a Warm Bath
(Con versacion con Bono de Agua Tibia), presented at
GAN, Sosa remain ed seated while she was slowly
bandaoed with toilet paper by Helena Villalobos until she
was c;mpletely covered. The action was accompanied
by a previously taped conversation between th e artist
Hector Fuenmayor and the composer Alfredo del Monaco
on the question of the work of art as a discursive form or
a way of thi nking. At the end, Villalobos bathed Sosa with
a bucket of wa ter, destroying the sculptural form created
by the hyer of paper stuck to the artist's body.
The young iournalist, actor, and performer, Marco Antonio
Ettedgu i rea li zed th e potential for partic ipation and
liberation that non-obiectual art offered th e public in an
underdeveloped cou ntry in its sea rch for spaces where
the di ·ide between art and life cou ld be bridged: "My art
is an mi of nooks, not of sa lons, but instead of nooks. Th e
maiorih· [ f my works] were perform ed in garages and
private hrmes and balconies out-of-doors. The viewer is
tran sfc..·t; ~d when approached in these places." 4 • In this
conte~t, ii is worth noting that at th e beg inning of th e
I 1980s there was a sudden interest on the part of public
in the: . ·~vorks, and institutiona l support for performance
art an J octions were para llel to the stimulus that the
Arg en 'n. director and promoter Carlos Gimenez gave
to the ' -, ter in Venezuela. Starting with the founding of
the g; ., J Raiatabla and the Caracas Internationa l
Theat~,r t= estival (1 975 ), ~s both initiatives by Gimenez,
works b; the most experimental and influential postwar
playwrights and groups such as Gutai, Kabuki, Tad euz
Kantor, Aug usto Boa l, Peter Weiss, Living Theatre, Els
Joglars and Li ndsay Kemp were staged . Gimenez not
only Ci" >t10;d an in sti tuti onal fram ework that favored th e
presence of experimental groups from Latin America,
Europe, Asia, and the U.S. , but also gave space to non-
obiectual practices within the festival , the coordination of
which was entrusted to Marco Antonio Ettedgui .
Even if the intersection of theater and non-obiectual
art lies beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to
note the central role played by Carlos Gimenez in
the public articulation of experimental and trans-
disciplinary vocabularies that favored the institutional
leg itimacy of performance art and actions at the end of
the 1970s. It is not accidenta l that this sort of golden
age of non-obiectual art also coincided with the return to
Ven ezuela of Pedro Teran , Diego Barboza, Rolando
Pena, Carlos Zerpa , Yeni and Nan, as we ll as th e
emergence of young artists such as Marco Antoni o
Ettedgui, Alfred Wen emoser and Juan Loyola.
In contra st to th e generation of Aleia ndro Otero, Jesus
Soto, and Carlos Cruz-Diez, who settled in postwar
Paris, emerging artists now traveled to New York and
London , attracted to a new type of art that assumed th e
shape of performances, acti ons, texts, and photographic
documentation that privileged th e context and reiected
the obiect in favor of its dematerialization and wh ich,
according to Alexander Alberro, situated art at "the
thres hold of information."J9 In th is context in 1970, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York had organized
Information, an exhibit th at launched globa l conceptual
practices, inc ludi ng works by Latin Ameri can artists
such as Helio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio, Th e
New York Graphic Workshop, Dav id Lame las, and
Aleiandro Puente, among others. Something similar
happened a year before in Bern and later in London
wi th the show When Attitudes Become Form, the
European vers ion of conceptual art.
Venezuela was on e of th e few Latin Am erican coun tries
not to be struc k by th e wave of military dictatorships th at
spread throug h Cen tral and South America during th e
years of Opera tion Condor and the influence of the
School of the Americas. so Still, th e country clun g to the
paradigms of abstract and Op art, which at the time,
were official and had become natio nal schools. The
changes dictated by the zei tgeist of hippie coun tercu lture,
the sexua l revoluti on, th e genera l condem nation of th e
U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and th e po litical urgency
123
 Claudio Perna. Antonio Mendoza's salsa band Chicles(Chewing Gum).
sound sculpture, Fundaci6n Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela, 1977
stirred by the Cuban revolution whic h accompanied
student movements at th e end of the 1960s, were, to a
certain degree, modestly linked loca lly to the guerrilla
warfare and the movement for academic reform initiated
at the Universidad Centra l de Venezuela, and which
became known as La renovaci6n.
Following the process of pacificati on of guerril la groups
and durin g the first administration of President Carlos
Andres Perez ( 197 4- 1979L a bipartisan constitutional
model was fin ally consolid ated. Emerging artists began
to colonize alternative spaces in an attempt to expand
th e ideo of art as exemp lified in Information or When
Attitudes Become Form. This moment also coinc ided with
the exponential growth of oil revenue that was brought
as a result of the nationalization of the industry. A massive
notional wealth was genera ted and managed by a
government that did not guarantee an equitable
di stribution of income benefiti ng the poorest sectors of the
population. Th e Perez period, which historians ironically
named "Ia gran Venezuela " (the Great VenezuelaL was
characterized by multi-million dollar investments in
infrastructure and higher education that ron a public debt
and generated widespread corruption in the public and
private sectors, and lead to a consumer culture .s l From
the beginning of the 1970s, emerging artists had
gathered around the art solon crea ted by Lourdes
Blanco at the Sola de Ia Fundoci6n Mendoza, wh ich she
124
Claudio Perna, Lluvia, escultura sociai(Rain, Social Sculpture), I
Fundaci6n Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela. 1979
I
provocatively named Eleven Guys .s2 In her wo rk , a ]
budding generational malaise began to creep in caused
by the processes of quick modernization that had been
implemented in the coun try, and wh ich were accompanied I
by moments of political repression. They also became
aware of the dangers of social exclusion 5 3 This inci pient
group was made up mostly of young , urban, mi ddle-
class professiona ls, and was beginning to expa nd due
the economic well-being ensured by petrodollars.
I
In 1971, Sigfreda Chacon, Ibrahim Nebreda, and W illiom
Stone organized The Bus, a participative expericr.ce
where the public could en ter a bu s parked at the Aten o
de Caracas. Referring to this, Lourdes Blanco high l i gl.~ d
the reactive intention of this heterogeneous grO' ·:, ')f
artists, led in the beginning by Stone, who with ot!1-.:rs J
members of the Design Institute Neumann, CEGRA and
the Escuelo de Aries Plasticos, "Conceived the ide·.l of
creating a movement that would distance itself both hnm
J
New Figuration as from Op art, because deep down
they were also under the influence of the desire to octivat·a J
the dimension that clamored for the participation of the
public, but also to cha llenge it."s4
J
Other artists who belong to an in-between gen eration
joined the group that congregated around Fundaci6n
Mendoza: Claudio Perna, a geography profes sor ot
Universidad Centr·al de Venezuela, Diego Barboza, · d
Diego BJ!L ,.. J . La Caja de Cachicamo (Armadillo's Bo.1). parki ng lot. Caricuao. Caracas. Venezuela. October 31. 1975
and painter trained in Maracaibo, and Rolando Pena ,
precu rsor of the happening, dance, and experimental
film , v !!c h d traveled around Europe and the U. S. in
search ; new horizons. Barboza and Perna had created
mail n1 .. r rtist books, and experiments with ephemeral
form s t'.': visua lity today categorized as conceptual .
Perna u,,rj Barboza we1·e also were pa rt of the programs
of Li breria Cruz del Sur. An alternative space open to
non-cor-ve ntional art forms , there they explored th e
particip .1 ! ry potential of popular cultu re to create works
inspired in the vemacular or the popular-festive, generating
situa tion, where commun ities were eventually created or
playful interactions emerged. In th e case of Perna , such
potentiol was used as a corrosive critical goal in a
system thot wou ld marginalize or ostrac ize the popular
to segr gate it from the processes of modernization. In
two di ffere nt editi ons of th e salon Eleven Guys, Perna
presented An toni o Mendoza's sa lsa band, Chewing
Gum tr .1.:.:/es), as a "sound sculplu1e," (1977) and later
on,Rain, Social Sculpture (Liuvia, escultura social,
1979), an installation made up of a prostitute sea ted
next to a table and a jukebox.'-5 A few years before, he
had crea te d collaborati ons with Charlotte Moorma n,
Mi10lda, and Antonio Muntadas, who had travel ed to
Venezuela as guests of the international video festival s
organized in the Museo de Arte Contempor6neo by
Margarita D'Amico. His insatiable curiosity regarding
dema ter iali zing procedures in the visua l arts ranged
from portraits commissioned, to film posters, popular
pain tings lo photocopies, and collective ly discarded
photographs gathered and exhibited by the artist in c1
show that attempted to reconfigure the nationa l
imaginary from residual layers. Perna also collaborated
with Eugenio Espin oza, so Hector Fu enmayor, Alfred
Wenemoser, and Roberto Obregon, artists who shared
wi th him the need to expand the notion of art in a
country whe re abstract modes of modern art were, and
still are, cons idered a modernization !ooi Y
125
 The squandering of resources and the corrupt system that
began during the administration of Carlos Andres Perez
continued during the constitutional period under Luis
Herrera Campins (1979-1984), until the economic crisis
known as Black Friday, when in 1983 Herrera Campins
was forced to devalue the currency with the sudden drop
in oil prices. Facing political conformity in the period
preceding Black Friday (with massive oil revenue and an
increase in imports, excessive consumption, tax evasion,
and public and private corruption), Diego Barboza and
Pedro Teran, two artists who had taken part in the 1960s
debate on new figurative art at the independent art space
El Circulo del Pez Dorado, undertook an anthropological
revision of popular culture, folklore, and foundational
myths of the republic. They would be joined by other artists
wi th divergent and heterodox views, such as Rolando
Pena, who had explored santerfa and vernacular ritual s,
Carlos Zerpa, and later, Juan Loyola.
In the manner of an intervention in Venezuelan popular
festivities, Diego Barboza created the event Armadillo's
Box (Caia del cachicamo), where a crowd would cover
itself with a large red tarpaulin prepared by the artist
to simulate an animal shell producing what Elsa
Flores called "a happy alliance of conceptual elements
and folk allusions."ss The work was designed by
Barboza to be carried out in outdoor spaces with
"public commemoration,"59 in a city where these form s
of community interaction were driven away from public
spheres due to the smoke of cars and th e invasion of the
informal economy (due in turn to unchecked demographic
growth and urban chaos which characte1·ize peripheral
capitals). cJ This "action poem ," as it was defined by
Barboza himself, came to recogni ze anew the col lective
celebration of an activity playfu lly produced by the
members of an anonymous social body, making this art
express ion accessible to an audience wider than that of
museums. Other "action poems" conceived by Barboza in
London included girls covered by colorful stockings or nets
strolling down the street in marches or pop music
conferences, intervening in the public space, and Pro-testas
or "heading protests" in which many wore colorful hats.61
Carlos Zerpa, in turn, had been exploring the popular
from a lineage formulated as the carnivalesque, which
inverted the rules of the game by exposing the dark and
126
grotesque side of popular culture, patriotic symbols, and
magic/religious rituals . Trained at the Polytechnic
Institute for Design in Milan (Italy) , at the end of the
1970s, Zerpa began to collaborate with the Mexican
collective No Grupo, whose members he met at th e First
Colloquium on non-objectual Art in Medellin . No Grupo
"proposed a dissident branch of the political groups
project: a parodic guerrilla that benefited both fro m th e
solemnity of committed artists, as from the clumsiness of
cultural institutions and social myths about the artist
[ ... ]" .62 Later on, he continued to develop important
performances with them, such as Hot-Hot (Caliente-
Caliente), presented at the Museum of Modern Art in
l
Mexico (1982) .63 Together with Perna, Barboza, and Yeni
and Nan, he also took part in th e show, 20 Venezuelan 1
Artists Today (1979), organized by Margarita D' Amico
at th e Centro de Arte y Comunicaci6n (CAYC) in Buenos
Aires, at the time, a space dedicated to conceptu al art
I
under the direction of Jorge Glusberg .
1
At Teatro Ia Campana de Valencia, Venezuela, Zerpa
had presented his performance Each with His Own
Saint (Coda cual con su propio santo), a work tha t was
1
censored for its non-conformist criticism of institutionali zed
religion. Afterward, Marco Antonio Ettedgui and Pedro
]
Teran joined in programs devoted to non-obj ectu al
experiences launched in several locations in Ca racas I
and elsewhere in th e country. One piece fro m thi s
fertile period is Ceremony with Sharp-Edged Weapons
(Ceremonia con Armas Blancas, 1981 ), a performn1 .~c
presented in the hall at Gobernaci6n in the fee·_,, Jl
district as part of the cycle Acciones frente a Ia pic /. a
and later shown in Mexico. Choosing the form ol •le
love letter to sustain the action , Zerpa played th e ·.J:c
of an inmate and read a letter, with his face p a i r~: .:d
J
white like a mime, while a bolero by Julio Jaramillo und
music composed expressly for the piece played in the ]
background. The action took place in an in ti ., ,ie
atmosphere created by Zerpa's confessional tone, w; ; :. 1,
according to witnesses, became troubled by stat:;: -f
agitation and violence in which the artist tried to inw}·e
the audience, with Brechtian-style interruptions witLsut J
proposing a final catharsis. M
Trained in the visual arts and film in London, where he
performed actions in the streets and obtained an important
Carlos Zerpa (with Enrique Lara and Francisco Palma). Ceremonia con armas blancas (Ceremony with Sharp-Edged Weapons),
Plaid, Sala de Ia Gobernaci6n, Caracas, Venezuela, April19, 1981

127
 prize at Ikon Gallery, Pedro Teran worked with his
body and from the body upon his return . He em bodied
several versions of the myth of El Dorado-Manoa , us ing
a highly stylized visual and personal langua ge. Like
Rolando Peiia, many of his performances (Exhibition
Body [Cuerpo de exposicion], Ateneo de Caracas
1973) were fashioned from a narcissistic perspectiv~
in order to reintroduce the public into history and its
fictions via this affirmation of male power. 65 Using
gestures of extreme mascu linity, Teran would unfold his
body in order to feminize it and show his subjectivity. In
this sense, Teran theoretically distinguishes between , on
the one hand, performances (events that for him u eate
an intimate connection between the viewer, th e body,
and subjectivity by ritualizing time) and on th e other,
1
actions geared towards the public sphere, where what
happens is not inscribed in a rituai. 66 Clouds for Colombia I
(Nubes para Colombia 1980-1981 ), a performance
created for an exhibit that never took place in Bogot667
was presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes as part of
1
the program Acciones frente a Ia plaza. Later, at the
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Francisco Narvaez in
Margarita, it was performed in the form of a sha manistic
ritual in three sequences, which began when the artist ]
manipulated canvases and pigments with the col ors of
the Colombian and Venezuela n flags. After he tore his
clothes and ended up covering his naked body with gold 1
paint and transforming himself in a sort of sculptural
representation of the myth of El Dorado.6B
1
Rolando Pena is a special case within this narrative. He
was a pioneer of happening s and performances who, in
his comings and goings between New York and Eur,;pe,
frequented Andy Warhol's circle and participated ir. the J
first Factory, which included experiments with fi lm and
theater. Pena trained in contemporary da nce with
Martha Graham's company in the same style as An lonieta J
Sosa and feminist artist Nela Ochoa. He produced early
works he presented at the School of Architecture nd J
Urban Planning at Univers idad Central de Ven ezuela,
Pedro Teran. Nubes pa1a Colombia (Clouds far Colombia).
straddling both theater and performance. Noteworthy
Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin. Colombia, 1ay 1981
among them is Homage to Miller (Homenaie a Miller ), J
created in collaboration with the writer Jose Ignac io
Cabrujas and the architect Domingo Alvarez. 09 In the
"1970s, Peiia participated in the festivals and exhi bits
organized by Mar·garita D'Amico. Yems later, he .J ·r a

1
28
 articularly symbolic and powerful performance at the
~th International Theater Festiva l, Crude Oil (Petroleo
Crudo). In this piece, he did a series of physical actions
that ha rmed his body and destroyed objects before
ending with an oil bath he poured from a barrel. Also
known as "The Black Price" (Principe Negro), Pena from
that point on appropriated th e world 's main source of
energy in order to transform it into a metaphor of
Venezuela as a nation doomed by its own wealth.
If Rolando Pena used oil to create a counter-narrati ve of
modernization, Juan Loyola manipulated th e national
flag in order to reinscribe it in places th at were foreign
to the hegemonic discourse of th e fatherland, which was
already untena ble by the mid-1980s, when Jaime
Lusin ch i (1984-1989) became president following the
"Black Friday" crisis. Lusinchi , a med ica l doctor and a
Social Democrat of humble origins who rose to power
under the promise of bringing back political stability to a
country ravaged by public corruption and a high poverty
index, did not honor his pledge to clean up public offices
and create new jobs, increasing instead the levels of state
repress ion . In this period of disenchantment and
depo!itization, Juan Loyola organized performances in
margi nal urban spaces, in wh ich he would paint the
national flag on old car carcasses, ornamental stones on
highways, and industrial junk scattered throughout the
city. This action became a poli tical ritual that assa iled the
daily lifr- of the residents of Caracas, showin g these
rem a i n~ •narked by a symbol th at had been emptied out
of its W!'l ning through the dysfunctional nature of its
disco'· · ·. Moreover, th e use of th e flag on ju nk and
waste :· :pets and in the metropolitan landscape was th e
result of !he systematic use of nationalist symbolism in
events and actions created by Loyola from the 1980s, in
which they were destroyed. Loyola was arre sted
numerou-. times by the police while in the midst of
perform· .g th ese actions on the street.
Long-te1·m collaboration among artists is something alien
to Ve nezuelan culture. This was changed by Yeni
(Jen nife, : iockshaw) and Nan (Maria Luisa Gonzalez)
who, over the course of seven years, created works
performed as duets that straddled experimental dance,
theater, and performan ce art. In contrast to artists of their
generati n, Yeni and Nan did not appeal to the country,
popu lar cu lture, or vernacular myths, but rather to a
feminist, self-reflexive language, and to a dialogue with
nature and con temporary dance experiments performed
in the U.S. by Simone Forti or Yvonn e Rainer. The artists
used water, fluids, and crysta ls as the poetic axes in thei r
exploration of "personal identity, the limits of individual
and shared space in th e you-1 dialectic. "7o As Amelia
Jones correctly points out, the body has been the place
where identiti es, in the plural , are self-conceived and
interpreted. Ac:.cording to this principle, Jones considers
tha t body art practices have turned to the exploration of
multiple, dispersed, and non-normative subjectivities JI
Yeni and Nan showed the conti ngent and unstable nature
of identities in many of th eir performances, from Birth,
(Nacimiento, 1979, Ga leria Angel Boscan, Caracas),
Integrations in Water (lntegraciones en agua, 1981 ),
presented at the Bienal de Soo Paulo, and proposed for
the Paris Biennial, where the meeting of their bodies and
their paused gesturing constituted actions that cha llenged
binary distinctions between interior and exterior, public
and private, inside and outside, and which, according to
Juan Calzadi lla, in the case of Parting Action of Space
(Accion divisoria del espacio, 198 1) "disturb the axial
structure of the couple."r
If information was a shared concern among conceptua l
ar ti sts all over the world in that it cha ll enged the
center/periphery opposition , communication, in turn ,
was the ideolog ica l bridge between artists such as Alfred
Wenemoser, Claud io Perna, and Marco Antonio Ettedgui.
Perhaps attracted by the cosmopolitanism enjoyed
by Venezuela at the time, Alfred Wenemoser settled
there in 1980, where he has created performances that
challenge the status of the work of art per se in an
information distribution and consum ption system.
Wenemoser's actions, like those by Ettedgui and Perna ,
have exposed th e conveiltions of art (Person to Person
[Persona a Persona], Domo Plaza Bolivar, 1981 ). They
explore the way in wh ich th ese conventions are
communicated to the public in a re source economy
where the passive or voyeu risti c stance of th e viewer is
inverted, creating dilemma situations. Bom in Graz and
influenced by Vienna's action art, Wenemoser quickly
became part of the group of Caracas performance
artists. Ida Pfngala II, an action chosen for the 1981
Bienal de Sao Paulo and presented in variants at the
129
 Fifth Theater Festival, used Tantric symbolism to place
the artist and the viewer in an ethical dilemma.73 After
a three-day fast, Wenemoser lay down in the middle
of the stage to await the verdict from the mask-wearing
audience, who had to choose between the sun (Pingala) ,
a male being symbolized by oranges placed on stage,
or the moon (Ida) , a female being represented by a
white dove trapped under a helmet. If the audience
chose to eat the oranges, this meant the artist would not
eat, and if they chose the dove, the artist would break
his fast by eating it.
In line with aesthetic forms stressing communication with
the audience, Marco Antonio Ettedgui, whose tragic
death at age twenty-two truncated a brilliant career,
created an important autobiographical event that shook
the institutional fabric of national museums in Venezuela.
Shown at the exhibit Search for the Image (lndaga cion
de Ia Imagen), proposed by Ettedgui himself at GAN,
Happy Birthday (Feliz Cumpleanos) was an event in
which the artist invited the public in general, family, and
friends to celebrate his birthday at a party held in the
museum. The slogan "the personal is political," used by
feminist activists in the 1970s as a legitimate expression
of the need to acknowledge individ ual freedom s
and sexua l difference as part of women's rights, was
theoretically recovered by Ettedgui in its libertarian
sense by applying it to the private sphere and the
symbolic space of national identity (inside a museum
whose mission is dedicated to Venezuelan art). By
celebra ting his birthday, a private act, as a daily-life
event shared with the public, fri ends, and family,
Ettedgui not only blurred the distinction between art and
life, but also between the public and the private
political elites, inasmuch as they held the promise of a
rational order in a country that had been undermined
by military rule of caudillos and underdevelopment. In
contrast, the dystopian model proposed by local non-
objectual practices and conceptual modes not only
questioned this willful order that suppressed cultural
miscegenation in the modern narrative, but rath er
proposed rethinking such mixing of the popular and
the vernacu lar as forces that were organically
constitutive of the nation . Another genealogical feature
]
of these experiences shows they cha llenged the central
and individual role played by the artist as a creative 1
genius, favoring instead a collective pedagogy, wh ich
chal lenged the place of the exhibit as a professional
space limited only to aesthetic contemplation. These
I
hybrid, transdisciplinary, and participatory practices
were devised to occupy the nooks, inside and outside
the museum, as Marco Antonio Ettedgui suggested, t
later show up in those uncomfortable places th ai the
philosopher Homi Bhabha has called the liminal figures
1
of the nation-space, the interstices of modernity whe1·e
no political ideology or ethnographic projec t can ]
exercise a transcendent or metaphysica l authority?s
Hence th e resistance of institutions to preserve their ]
memory, and of criticism to interpret it.
J

Experiences and situations pointed out throughout this

text do not totalize the history of non-objectual art, nor J
do they reduce it to a list of unpublished experiences
contributed by specific artists.-J An alternative vision of
Venezuela was constructed through these actions, one
that is different from the one offered by abstract, Kinetic,
and Op art, which argued that Venezuela could only
J
attain progress and cultural independence by embracing
these universal forms of modern art. Such idealized forms,
self-contained and autonomous, were attractive for the
modernization pmjecl of the intellectual, economic, and

30
 Even if we accept that happenings, performances, actions and situations do not do away with obj ects even while they dematerialize them, we
have opted for the term "non-objectual art, " used by the Mexican-based Peruvian critic Juan Acha, because it allows us to consider performances
that are not necessarily theatrical, where the body of the artist need not intervene in order to create a situation or produce and event. On the
other hand, the term non-objectual recovers, historically speaking, the reference to the Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano de Arte No-Obietual,
which took place in Medellin, Colombia in 1981. This event created a different perception from that of critics who judged happenings,
performances, and actions as derivative of events that happened in the U.S.A. and Europe. Acha was a great regional promoter of this type of
hybrid, ephemeral art, stimulating artists who were making forays into very conse rvative media .
2 Amelia Jones, Body Art, Performing the Subiect (Minneapolis and London University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 21.
3 Ari el Jimenez, Tradicion y Ruptura: La invencion de Ia continuidad (Galeria de Arte Nacional : Caracas), 37.
4 Marla Elena Ramos, "Una aproximaci6n al cuerpo del performance en Venezuela," Revista Pulgar, Caracas, 2007 .
5 Juan Calzadilla, "Siete eventos para una nueva l6gica del arte venezolano," Acciones frente a Ia plaza (Fundarte: Caracas, 1995), n.p.
6 The most recent institutional life took place in the 1990s with severa l body art even ts and exhibits sponsored by the Museo de Bellas Aries under
the leadership of Maria Elena Ramos. In those years, the Galeria de Arte Nacional and the Museo Alejan dro Otero also occasionally opened
their program ming to performances and actions within thematic exhibits.
7 After rejecting the idea of a commemorative exhibit, lnocente Palacios and Miguel Arroyo convinced the Municipal Council of Caracas to give
Jacobo Borges the green light for a 1967 "multimedia" project that would celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of the city. Palacios
would remain as producer, mediating between the State and the artist and his collaborators .
8 Angel Ramo, Antologia de El Techo de Ia Ballena (Fundarte: Caracas, 1987), 11 -36.
9 Thi s idea is re peated and becomes a historiographic principle in texts that go from exhibition catalogs such as La Decada Prodigiosa, Los
Ochenta, La lnvenci6n de Ia Continuidad, to monographs by Maria Elena Ramos y Juan Carlos Palenzuela.
10 An exception is the private collection of Ignacio E. and Valentino Oberto, who hove created an archive that documents the actions of El Techo
de Ia Ballena and some performances from the 1970s.
11 Juan Calzadilla argues that the performatic rituals by Armando Rever6n in El Castillete de Macula, documented by various filmmakers and
ph otographers, should be seen os precursors to body art in Venezuela. Even if this idea is interesting, a discussion of this material lies beyond
the scope of thi s essay
12 1agrer> with Amelia Jones's position in considering the body as constitutive of a subjectivity excluded from postmodernism by theoreticians
asso<: 'ated with th e journal October. Jones argues that, "Body art is specifically antiforma list in impulse, opening up the circuits of desire
inform: ng artistic production and reception . Works that involve the artist's enactment of her or his body in all of its sexual, racial , and other
pmticularities, and overtly solic it spectatorial desires unhinge the very deep structures and assumptions embedded in the formalist model of art
evaluation " Jones, Body Art, 50.
13 I om referring to themati c exhi bitions motivated by a comparative approach that does not privilege European or North American works in its
sel ection such as Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum, 1999), Wack/ Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art-M MA PS 1, 2007 -2008), and Global Feminism (The Brooklyn Museum, 2006-2007)
14 Very f w of these authors publ ished a compilation of essays, as is the case of Elsa Flore s, Convergencias (Caracas: Monte Avil a, 1983), or
monographs on a specific event, such as Maria Elena Ramos, Acciones frente a /a Plaza (Caracas; Fundarte, 1995) and Juan Carlos Palenzuela ,
Once Ti;.os, (Caracas: Academio de Ia Hi storia, 2002).
15 An exc..,ption is "Embodying Ven ezuela, an essay by Mario Elena Ramos, published in Coco Fusco, Corpus Delecti, Performance Art of the
Am~;ri..:os (London Routledge, 2000).

16 Rc;eL' l Goldberg, Performance Art, From Futurism to the Present (New York Thames & Hudson , 2005).
17 Mem ··rs of this group were : Edmundo Aray, Alberto Brandt, Jacobo Borges, Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Daniel Gonzalez, Salvador
Garm · dia, Adriano Gonzalez Leon, Angel Luque, Gabriel Morera, D6maso Ogaz, Caopolic6n Ovalles, and Franci sco Perez Perdomo.
18 The ro ject foro free bourgeois society was supported by the signatories of the Partido de Punta Fiio, a political and economic all iance signed
in Oc 0ber 1958 between th e Army, bu siness leaders, the Church, and the right-of-center political parties excluded the Venezuelan Communist
Par~· (PCV). The outstanding contribution of PCV to the struggle against the Perez-Jimenez dictatorship was unable to guarantee it a degree of
pow<>r 'n the new order inougurated by the presidency of the sociol-democrat, R6mulo Betoncourt.
19 The rr1·,,, noteworthy were perhaps the exhibits of Grupo Zero, Julio Le Pare, The New York Grophic Workshop, ~No group show s where artists
sud· ' · ;i'1ns Haacke 'ln ' Bruce Nauman partici pated, as we ll as the Op artists Jesus Solo, Carlos Cru z Diez and the Venezuelan con ceptuol
arti. : :·< ~ 1 :l r FJenf'layor, Eugenio Espinoza, and Claudio Perna. Lourdes Blanco, "A solos en Ia Sola Mendoza," Cecilia Fajardo Hill and Aix
Sar.(: ... -., eds., Sa/a Mendoza : 1956-2001 , 45 aiios de his/aria del arte contemporaneo en Venezuela (Carocas: Ediciones Sola Mendoza,
200 1).1 08-155
20 Rev iew founded by Alejandro Otero and a group of Venezuelan artists in 1950 in Paris. Otero published five numbers together with Pascual
Navarro, Mateo Moncure, Miguel Arroyo, Luis Guevara Moreno, Carlos Gonzalez Bogen, Narciso Debourg, Peron Erminy, Ruben Nunez, Dora
Hersen, Aime Battistini , and the classical dancer Belen Nunez, th e filmmaker Gsar Enriquez, and the philosophy student JR Guil lent Perez.
21 Only at the beginning of her tenure as Director of the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas did Sofia Imber favor programs such as
video crt festivals, coordinated by Margarita D'Amico, in which Latin American, European, and North American artists participated, including
membPr' of Flu xus.

131
 22 The exhibit Living Spaces (Espacios Vivientes), organized by Peron Erminy and Juan Calzadilla, pushed the limits of the old abstraction-figuration
divide present in Venezuelan art from the 1940s and 1950s, a debate that had been led in the Venezuelan press by the artist Alejandro Otero
and th e writers Miguel Otero Si lva and Mario Briceno lragorry. Espacios Vivientes proposed viewing abstraction as an existentiali st meditation
on the amorphous without positing a division between figurati ve art as an inclusive form , legible by the common person, and abstraction as 0
falsely universal, elitist and hence reacti onary language.
23 The foundational manifesto of the group, entitled It Would Seem As If Any Attempt at Renewal (Pareciera que todo in ten to de renovacion), spelled
ou t the warning, "It would seem as if any attempt at renewal , or rather at exploration or experimentation , in art would lean towards, whether
we like it or not, the mention of groups who prospered at the beginning of this ce ntury, such as Dada or Surrealism. Even though we do keep
in mind these experiments when founding El Tech o de Ia Bal lena, it is not, our intention to revive actions or resuscita te gestures that lime has laid
in their proper place in the history of con temporary art and literature." Angel Ramo, Antologia, 49.
24 Although there is no docu mentation on happenings organi zed by Alberto Brandt, a member of El Tech o de Ia Ballena, the critics Juan Calzadilla
and Peron Erm iny argue that they con tributed to prepare the way for the appearance of conceptual ar t in th e country. Albe rto Brandt, Cozador
de avestruces, exh. catalog, Galerla de Arte Nacional, Caracas.
25 Ana Longoni and Mariano Meslman , Del Di Tello a Tucuman Arde. Vanguardia artistica y politico en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: El Cielo
por asalto, 2000).
26 Ramo, Ibid .
27 Blanco, Ibid , 108- 155.
28 Imagen de Caracas was based on the Brechtian notion of th e interruption of action and participation, in which thea trical elements and film
]
images become fragmented in space and th eir co ntents are completed by the spectator, who also needs to move around in order to follow the
action projected onto various screens. The in situ presence of actors completed the intention.
29 The collaborating artists were: Jacobo Borges, Mario Robles, Juan Pedro Posani , Josefina Jordan, Manuel Espinoza, Jorge Chirinos, Ramon Undo,
]
Edmundo Vargas, Ana Brumlik, Maricarmen Perez Alvaro Bosc6n, Luis Luksic, and Francisco Hung. For more information about th is proj ct
see Marisol Sanz Imagen de Caracas: historia, imagen y multimedia (Ob;eto Visual, cuaderno de investigacion de Ia Cinemateca Nacional.
No.3, 1996), Caracas.
30 This manifesto was pu blished in Imagen de Caracas, A Unique Place, an ar ti cle signed by lnocente Palacios and printed in The Drama Review:
TDR, Vol. 14, No.2. Latin America n Th eatre (Winter, 1970), 130-37.
31 Posani, who began as o draftsman in th e 1950s in th e office of the architect Carlos Raul Villanu eva, began at th e ti me collaborating witl, ]
Villanueva in the design of the School of Economic and Social Sciences at the Universidad Centra l de Venezuela ( 1967- 1979).
32 The idea of quasi cinema was developed by Hel io Oiticica in installations where the cinema ti c experience was liberated from a pas siv
consumption of images and alienating fictions . This type of experience conceived by Oiticica was stimulated by his readings of Herbert Marcuse, ]
Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, and the reception of Brecht's ideas by Jean-Luc Godard.
33 This and other poin ts were kindly clarified by Borges in an interview wi th the author in January 2008 in N ew York.
34 The actors, for the most part, were common people, members of the film crew, celebrities from the arts and intellectual milieu, including Miouel
]
Arroyo and lnocente Palacios, who played historical characters.
35 For insta nce, the relationship between Simon Bolivar and Simon Rodriguez was narrated as a strol l through a beautiful and colorful garden,
whereas th e execution of Manuel Gual was told in black and white.
]
36 When Image of Caracas was shut down, Jacobo Borges, deeply affected, ceased painting for several years and co-founded a left-wing ro' i: · ~ .1!
par~; Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), devoting hi s time to creating political ortworks ond agitprop.

37 During the Coldero'~ five-yem term , Bernordo Bertolucc i's film Last Tango in P ris wa s censored for its pornogra phic conten t.
J
38 Sosa's show 'NOS en ti tled Siete ob;etos Blancos.
39 Brazil, like Arg entino, Uruguay, and Paraguay, was under o military dictatorship at the lime. In New York, artists thot we re bosed th ek s1 ::, J
os Luis Comnitzer, Gordon Motto-Clark, Mothias Goeritz, and Lorenzo Hamar organized o counter-biennial in condemno tion of the diclatorsf,; J• .
40 Rafoel Pi nedo, o member of the Comm ittee Pro Museum of Ciudad Bolivar, published on article entitled "No queme su obra, " (Don 't Burn ':hr
Work) in the doily El Nacianal (Caracos) on Friday, Sept. 5, 1969.
41 An tani ela Sosu's Re oponse lo Ra fa el Pineu ·, El NocionJI (Curocosi, :>unJay, September/, 1969.
42 Such works ottempted to integrate the iewcr v. ith lht: , rk o .l:n~ of th e wu rk os such in th e same way the experiments of Groupe de Reche1cl,e
Audiovisuel (GRAY) h d done in Poris in 19o6. J
43 This type of sexual aggressiveness on the par t of a moss-oriented viewer that transforms the artist into on idol wos fo regrounded by Yoko Or:0
in Cut Piece, 1965.
44 Lucia no Figueiredo, ed Lygia Clark. Helio Oitici a. Carlos 1964-197 4 (Rio de Janeiro UFRJ, 1996), 5;-'a, 64.
45 The ar tists tha t participated in Experiencias Visuales 68, a group show curated by Jorge Romero Brest, decided to destroy their works on ihL
street where the Galeria Di Tello was loca ted in protest aga inst the censoring of the piece El Bono by Roberto Plate, also present in tha t sf 0 11
and removed by the police.
46 Sosa, Ibid.

J
132
 Marco Antonio Ettedgui, "Encuesta" Maria Elena Ramos, Acciones Frente a Ia Plaza.
47
8 Both events had sizeable budgets granted by the State.
4
9 Alexander Alberro, ed., Conceptual Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
4
Operation Condor was a stole policy implemented mostly in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s by the military dictatorships against the ideological
50
opposition.
The Gra n Mariscal de Ayacucho scholarship fund, which supported middle-class students going abroad, was created .
51
The first edition took place in April 1973 and was curated by Lourdes Blanco until 1976, when she quit the directorship of Sola Mendoza and was
52
succeeded by Margot Romer. The salon Once Tipos was organized until 1981, at which point the name was changed to Premia Eugenio Mendoza.
3 If Blanco's motivation to organize such a salon was to show specific alternatives to local constructivism and Op art to the members of MaMA's
5
International Council gathered in Caracas in 1973, this salon became a refuge for conceptual artists and those interested in transdisciplinary
and Non-objectual practices.
54 Blanco, Ibid., 148.
55 For an assessment of impact of this salon during this period, I recommend the monograph by Juan Carlos Palenzuela, Once Tipos (Caracas:
Academia de Ia Historic, 2002) and the art catalog of the retrospective Arte Social, Claudio Perna (Caracas: Galeria de Arte Nacional, 2004).
56 Espinoza created Impenetrable, a mesh painted on a canvas, which questioned the idea of aesthetic autonomy in Solo's Penetrable.
57 Gabriela Rangel, "EI Mono Geogr6fico," Arte Social, Claudio Perna (Caracas: Galeria de Arte Nacional, 2004), 66- 73.
58 Elsa Flores, Convergencies (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1983), 89.

59 Ibid.
60 These problems were particularly serious during the period previous to the construction of Caracas's subway in 1983.
61 In 1970, Barboza created his "action poems" in pop music concerts, parks, and public marches in London, with girl s wearing nets or stockings;
he later used hats.
62 Oli vi r Debroise, ed., La era de Ia discrepancia (Mexico City UNAM-Turner, 2006), 226-227.
63 Si nce th ere were multiple intersections between performers and conceptual artists in the region, promoted by Non-objectual art meetings
organized by Juan Acha in th e period, it is worth conducting a more systematic search for Zerpa's works in Mexico.
64 Elsa Flores and Juan Calzadilla agree on this approach.
65 Amelia Jones provides an insightful reading of Vita Acconci's performance Seedbed as a work that indicates this type of turn in subjectivity.
Jane;,, Body Art, 136-137.
66 Interview with the artist, November 2007.
67 Organized by Juan Acha in Medellin, Colombia, and with a text by Moria Elena Ramos.
68 Du ring the conquest and colonization of the New World, the Spaniards were look ing for a Gol den City called fl Dorado. The city v;a s
transfor med into a myth, becoming a trick used by Amerindians in order to doom the conquerors in their ambition.
69 Alv''re::- i< a prominent architect who was part of Carlos Raul Villanueva's team and in the 1960s and 1970s creoted eloborote in sta l!otion s
vd r . rr )lo that distorted space and destroyed th e consi stency of the white cube, creoli ng insteod on il lusiona ry environment.
70 For ..':)fe information see the issue of Frankin Furnoce's magazine Flue devoted Ia Lati n Amer icon artists (1 981 ).
71 Jo1 ., Ibid., 214-216.
72 Mor i0 Elena Ramos, Acciones, Ibid , n p.
73 Els<; ,- hres suggested this idea in a !ext that was distributed during the Bienal and was later reprinted in Convergencios
74 Notubly absent is Angel Vivos Aria s, a key figure in performance or! during the 1970s and 1980s. Thi s omission is due to the lack of materials
at rP>eorch centers in Venezu ela .
75 Ho;•1i K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London Routledge, 1990), 298-30 I.

133
 Conditions, Roads, and Genealogies of Mexican Conceptualisms, 1921-1993
Maris Bustamante
For many years I have argued that non-objectual art t
is not only a new arti stic genre, but also represents a
new way of thinking about reality from the perspective
of the arts and particularly the visual arts. In Mexico, th e
arti sts who first carried out non-objectual art experiments
all came from the visual arts, which differs from the case
of Spanish art, where almost all performance artists
ca me from the avant-garde theater scene; which is
why I, and other artists of the early non-ob jectual art
generation, argue to thi s day th at performance cannot
be defined as "theater."
Since th ese non-traditional and non-objectual narrative
structures were developed by so-ca lled radical artists
-for many considered to be " imp ious"-! termed th e
fi rs t three non-obj ectual art forms -performance,
install ati on, and ambient pieces- PIAS Forms (Formas
PIAS). Using the first letter of each of th ese mediums, I
coined th e term "PIAS Forms" in 1993 as a play on pfas,
or "pious," in Spanish . It seems to have been successful
and become part of everyday vocabu lary. For me it was
a private joke to say that the P/AS Forms, conceived and
carried out by thi s newly emerged iconoclastic artist, were
doing a great service to national cultu re.
These new forms of reasoning, perceiving, and sensing
reality were recogni zed in the 1970s-they did not arise
sponta neously, but con be traced back to events nnd
actions whose structure exceeded accepted forms at the
time . They could be acts of exhibi tio ni sm, pseudo acts of
insan ity, of defiance, or even personal jokes. The a logica l
structure of these narrative forms now presents itself as
a real alternative to th e trad iti onal (logical) nmrati ves of
European rationa lism, which are now in utter decline.
Non-objectual art has required the integration of various
fie lds that had previously been understood as
autonomous disciplines. Non-ob jectual artists are much
more complex than traditiona l ones. Non-conventional
narratives, wh ich operate according to a different
logic, need to be validated by a hi stori ca l lineag e, a
fv1ari., Buslillllallle, F'iita quitarie a Freud Ia macho ITo Get Rid of tiie f'vlacho in r"rt · ;J.
Escuela NocionJI de Artes Pli1sticas San Carlos. Universidild Nacional de Me ico. DF., Me ico. January 19, 1!;~.2
134
genealogy, or in other wo rd s, cultural genetics. The
genea logy of PIAS Forms is not lin ear. Non-objectua l
arti sts have therefore been categorized as 'rad ical ,' a
label imposed upon them .
I was lucky to have been part of the Groups Movement
(Movimiento de los Grupos) in th e 1970s. In fact, I co-
founded and worked in two of these groups: No Grupo2
and Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder) .J The
rupture that was created at th e tim e by th e work is
perceived as being almost na·lve today, 4 which si mply
ind icates that previous paradigms have been surpas ed .
Almost all of us who participated in the Groups Movement
saw ourselves as leftists, although with a num ber of
varian ts, from the most orthodox and sectarian to the
sim plest of positions. We truly wanted to create new
proposals that broke comp letely with the automa tic
reproduction we had learned in our fam ilies, sch ools,
and local culture. We were inevitably going agai nst th e
system; thus the system let us know its rejection th rough
our families, schools, and local cu lture .
There are several "drives" that I identify amongst those
of us who participated in the groups, such as: fina ncittg
proj ects and institutions; altruism; a rejection of the
traditional art market; expanding the range of opt :t.s
and the search of new markets; wo rking for ge'lder
equali ty; studi es of the body and gender; and su r~ .t
for young artists. I will only deal with one of the m I .. ',
wh ich involved defending ourselves from cultural c,-,d
hi storical hegemonies. We know that " accepted hi stcry"
ind icates and proves that Conceptualism beg an in
Europe, and the chronology of movem ents progre :~~~
from the avan t-garde th rough Futurism , Dadaism , u':d
th en Conceptualism. But although it may appear a: -
more drive (perhaps a neurotic tendency or fixati or.; it
is still arguable that in our country the cond itions w"'r"
favorable for the appearance of non-ob jectual art on its
own and not through importation. Sometimes it worked
inversely; Latin American artists and movements indeed
influenced Europe.
] ..
 I have argued elsewhere that, because of the duality of
Mesoamerican cosmology,s the Spanish conquest and
colonization were unable to completely impose Western
European thought here. Today we see the coexistence
of the two. For example, our sense of time and space is
different from the west; therefore, interrelations are
expressed in a different manner. As an artist and an
academic, 6 I have been particularly interested in
exploring the non-European genealogies that promoted
Mexican conceptual art.l
Precedents of Mexican non-objectual art can be found
throughout the twentieth century, particularly between
1921 and 1993 . The beginning of this trajectory marks
the appearance of the avant-garde estridentista artists,
who lived and provided non-objectual art experiences. B
The year 1993 brought an end to the period with the
founding of the Museum X-Teresa, which was the first
non-objectual art museum in Latin America. The
institutionalization of the genre in Mexico indi ca ted that
this task was complete and some of us have thus sought
concrete alternatives through the use of interdisciplinmity
to promote collaboration among artists and scientisls 9
In what follows I will briefly sketch out the lineage of
performance art from the Twentieth century that shaped
the history of non-objectual art in Mexico.
The Lineage Of Alogical Narratives ! ~
1921-1927 Estridentismo''
At the end of 1921 , the Mexican poet Manuel Maples
Arce launched the first manifesto m "flier" that
inaugurated the movement. He named it Actual No. I .
It was basically a manifesto of rebellion that spoke out
against th e established modes and attacked academic
literary conventions, particularly Modernism , the
prevailing movem ent of the time . Th e preface to the
"flier" included provocative statements with ontipotriotic
and antireligious content such as "Die Priest Hidolgo " l2
or "Down wi th Saint Raphael." Maples Arce's call soon
found on echo. IJ Th e Estridentistos called th e city of
Jalapa, Estrident6polis, and met in the Cafe de Nodie
(Cafe of Nobody) when in Mexico City.
136
The conceptual affinities between Estridentismo and
PIAS Forms are:
A concern with the problem of innovation in social
attitudes and behaviors and the renewal of the structures
of artistic narratives.
An exploration of the possibilities of images.
A dismissal of logical elements that have explicatory
meaning, that is, to eschew conventional narratives that
explain themselves .
An unabashed interest in being avant-gorde.
To create total chaos and anarchy.
l
They stood in opposition to the established order and
attacked academic literary conventions, which th en
opened the door to an attack on the visual arts
1
academies.
]
Art is assumed as urban and cosmopolitan. There is no
tolerance for lack of information or the separation of
"kindred spirits." They did their work in thei1- l o ~a l 1
context, but were informed and had contact with fi gures
from the European avont-garde. ]
According to their own words: "It is no longer possible
to remain in the conventional chapters of national art. ''
They stirred virulence in the centers of cultural power in
order to reach extreme situations, or in their own words.
to promote the "immi nence of an assault." 1s
1
1924 Maria Valente, the Musical Magicia•1
I
"Of the women associated with Bo-la-c lan, M 1; •
Valente is the most surprising one. She performs usi11.1 l
dessert plates, th e true music that should only be heard
at the end of banquets. Th e music of plates and sp oon ~
forks and knives , is something like the harmonir
I
synthesis of banquets," wrote th e estridentista writer
Arque les Vela. lo
1925 Women for Sale
One of the most memorable actions by the estridentista s
was Women for Sale (Vento de Mu;eres) . In th e last
months of 1925, Arqueles Vela published three articles
on Estridentismo; the first, "Women Sampler," is a l i ~ . of
 ty es of women at sale prices . Vela does not mention the Open Air Schools and Popular Centers for Painting ,
th~ outcome of the "sale," but German List Arzubide in mainly led by Fernando Leal, a forerunner of Mexican
"EI movi miento estridentista" (1926), notes that the day muralism . In November of that year, there was a proto-
after th e prices were set, there was an auction at the performance at Convento de Ia Merced and in the
headquarte rs of the estridentista movement. presence of the Minister of Public Education, Ezequiel
Padilla . After getting the public's attention, the famous
"We hove pu t some models on sale here and will be on clown, Pirrln made an appearance and delivered a
view in our emotional shop windows: speech while riding an elephant. The speech was written
on a very long strip of paper and critiqued traditional
Was Now at education. The event was Fernando Leal's idea . He
was well-known for his iconoclastic attitudes.
Beautiful Morni ng Woman $ 150.00 $ 75.00
Simple Afternoon Woman $ 135.00 $ 65.00
Complicated Federico Sanchez Fogarty's
Even ing Woman $ 200.00 $ 99.99 Empire of Tacubaya
Delicate Woma n For Tea $ 140.00 $ 70.00 The so-called Empire of Illusion (Imperio de Ia !fusion) was
J Sumptuous Soiree Woman $ 290.00 $ 145.00 comprised of more than three hundred parties of various
Cheerful Sporty Woman $ 120.00 $ 60 .00 types that were carried out over twenty three years. They
l Grieving Woman
were gathered 1n Grand Saturdays (Los Grandes
For Widowers $ 300.00 $ 150.00 Sabados), The Imperial School (La Escuela Imperial), All
Imperial - originally in English- and Crazy Teas (Tes
I Picturesque Woman
For Travel $ 500.00 $ 250.00 Locos). These parties, which were attended by th e most
prominent figures of the period including President Miguel
Chic Woman $ 9,000.00 $ 4,000.00
J Woman For The Street $ 80.00 $ 40.00
Aleman (who asked to be invited), became a tradition.
During the Crazy Teas, starting at 7 pm sharp, Sanchez
11
Cheap Woman $ 60.00 $ 30.00 Fogarty played his phonograph, which he conducted with
Ordinory Woman $ 25.00 $ 12.50 a baton as if he were an orchestra conductor. At these
Estridentis!a Woman $10,000.00 $ 5,000.00 17 parties, Sanchez Fogarty wou ld proclaim himself
"Admiral" of a fl eet of bicycles .

192( -1 931 Period of the Ba lmoreadas

For r!, · years and th 1·ee months, Conc hita Jurado
impe1 :;J:1ated Don Carlos Balmori. Dressed like a man
and h~:;l ped by the journalist, Eduardo Delhumeau who
feig ned being her agent, she 'bal mored ' ambitious
peoph who sough t Balmori, the hen with the go lden
eggs 1ic her than Rockefeller, and more powerful than
Van dPrbilt and Ford. 1"
1940 The Apparition of the Sphinx of the Night
Isabel Marin was "dressed in a larg e white tunic and
hiding her head behind a large butterfly. " '~ This action
took place during the opening of a surrea list exhibit at
Galeria de Arte Mexicono and was defended as a
Surrealist oct. It was well received and had an important
impact on cultural and mtistic prod uction in Mexi co .

1928 Salud and 30-30! 19 1949 Mathias Goeritz

Thi s vv,ls a group of artists who launched the First 30-30!
Manifesto to criticize the stale artistic academy and the
work of students and teachers at the antiquated
Aca d r lia de San Carlos (the Academy of San Carlos).
Th e (JIOU p was form ed by students and teach ers from
Mathias Goeritz was bom in 1915 in Gdansk (Danzig),
Poland, and died in 1990 in Mexico City. He arrived in
Mexico in 1949 with a solid career. He had a great
influence with his projects and his academic activities
at Universidad lberoamericana and the Universidad

137
 Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico (UNAM) School of
Architecture. His students remember him for his freedom,
knowledge, and imagination, as well as his humanist
stance21. Goertiz conceived of a "Total Art." In 1958 and
in collaboration with the architect Luis Barragan and Jesus
Reyes Ferreira, he created the well-known sculpture
Satellite Towers (Torres de Satelite), which became one
of the emblems of Mexico Cityn In 1952, he created The
Echo, an Equation in Motion (EI Eco, una ecuacion en
movimiento) for UNAM's Museo Experimental, which
became a veritable "manifesto for emotional architecture,"
and one of his main projects 23 Another notable work is his
project for Route of Friendship (Ruta de Ia Amistad) , a
series of monumental sculptures for the Mexico City
Olympic Games in 1968, which opened the way to
urban and "circulation-friendly" art. In 1978 he led
UNAM's project for Espacio Escult6rico (Sculptural
Space), the first university project on the continent to
regard the works of visual artists on the same level as
those of researchers in the sciences and humanities.24
1955 Primera Confrontaci6n
de Arte Experimental
The show Primera Confrontaci6n de Arte Experimental
(First Confrontation of Experimental Art) was organized
by Mathias Goeritz with the Canadian painter Lucien
Parizeau at Galeria Proteo in Mexico City25
1961 The Fed-Ups (Los Hartos)
Thi s group, brought together by Matias Goeritz at Galeria
Antoni o Souza,"6 was fmmed by thirteen exhibiting artists
who placed an "h " (a silent consonant in Spanish) in front
of their occupation. Thus, Mathias was an "hintelectual "
(intellectual), Pedro Friedeberg the "harquitecto" (architect),
Chelo Abascal de Lemion et the "homo de coso"
(housewife), Agripina Maqudo "hinstitutriz" (governess), the
" hobrero" (worker) Benigno Alvarado, Kati Horna, a well-
known photographer was an "hobjetivista" (objectivist), Jesus
Reyes Ferreria was the " hembarradm de papeles" (paper
smudger), Octavia Asta was the "haprendiz" (apprentice),
the businessman Francisco Avalos was an "hindustrial "
(business leader), and Jose Luis Cuevas was "hilustrador"
(illustrator). The twelhh participant was "Hinocencia"
(Innocence), a hen and her egg ("huevo" in Spanish) .
38
1963 Alejandro Jodorowsky:
"Towards an Ephemeral Panic or Take the
Theater out of the Theater!"
This is in the conceptual platform that mapped the non-
conventional artistic narratives for that which was to follow·
If we establish a relationship between pictorial
and theatrical relations, we shall declare th at
"ephemeral" panic has the task of abandoni ng
figuration and abstraction in order to arrive at a
concrete manifestation. The new plastic attitude,
the concrete one, treats painting as an object th at
l
does not represent on a surface (in a more or less
stylized way) an object that is external to the
painting. In this kind of painting , a spot is a spot,
a dead bird is a real dead bird , and a color doe
not symbolize spiritual states or temperatures . The
1
limits between painting and sculpture bec ome
blurry and what the painter produces is a "plastic 1
object": in which he or she does not just use
traditional pictorial materials, but also ads pieces
of reality subordinated to the vi su al , but wh ich
1
nonetheless don't lose their individuality, wheth er it
be literary, musical, etc. '' ]
Jodorowsky clearly lays out the structure behin d non-
objectual attitudes and proposes to conce ptually
dislodge theater and painting from th e place th ey
occupy (their disciplinary fields) and "bring them I
togeth er" into a conceptua l a-disc ipli nary space. fkm
this proposal stems wha t he th en call ed "c o11c~le
aesthetics," whe re th ese cJi sc iplines acqu ire a .. :'v
1
"reality" value w ithi n th e imagi nati on , that is to soy·:· Jt
fi ction is eliminated , and thu s what happen s i11 the
presentations (when repres entation disappears), al: o
happens in rea lity during th e performance of th e ac,ic,n. J
The su bj ects become th e ob jects of thei1· own o. tis!ic
proposal s, being directly 1·espons ible in live mo ~ tor
what they propose to the audience.
The novel structure of "artist action, " or perforrn or.ce J
emerged . It is a direct descendant of the happeni ng, but
is more structured. These actions differ from conven tiona l
theater and the visual arts in that they conform to new,
alogical structures .
.J
1
Felipe Ehrenberg, A Date with Fate at the Tate (01; Tate Bait),
The Tate Museum, London, Eng land, October 21, 1970
1963 Bahia Sports, Manuel Felguerez
and Alejandro Jodorowsky
The ' lvxts facility known as Bahia Sports was located in
Delt- ·c< i6n lztapalapa in Mexico City. The artist and
fil mm Ler Geisen Gas proposed the space far the
actic ;, For the opening of a mural by Felguerez and
with i>c
help of theater gr-oups known by Jodorowsky,
an P.p1emeral action was created which began
wh en Jodorowsky, as the main character and dressed
acco. dingly, descended into the middle of a pool
from , helicopter· using a rope while reading a poem
by 1 ·:· utrearnont entitled , "Equal." All actions and
imp:' ;~ lions took place simultaneously. Among them
were ~:::9 nes performed in the numerous chang ing rooms
alor J "ide the pool. Each changing room had a door.
A lur..;c number of them opened and closed, and variou s
for ms of illumination would allow viewers to watch
scen es of couples interacting, kissing, and making love.
In the m:dd le of the swimming pool, there was a platform
for lhc da ncers' performance. During the dress rehearsal
the day before, the helicopter's pilot mistakenly got too
close to the water, which caused the engine to explode
and the propeller of the vehicle was violently hurled
towards the bleacher·s placed in front of th e dressin g
moms, which fortunately had no peopl e in them. The
heli copter got stuck in th e woter and remained there as
pmt of the ambient piece The 1200 viewer·s who attended
the opening considered the piece to be vet)' daring. ' "
1963 Juan Jose Gurrolao?
Gurrola carried out his first art action in 1963, which was
labeled as performonce: Word Ja zz 0azz Palabra), wi th
Juan Vicente Melo, Juan Garcia Ponce, and Carlos
Monsiv6is. A multitalented and daring visual artist and
architect, theater director, public speaker, and voluntarily
a "si tuation is!. " Gurrola presented countless actions. In
Flash Duel (Duelo de Flashes, 1964) simultaneous flashes
were exchanged with a nightclub photographer in Bar Los
Lobos, Acapulco, Guerrem, Mexico. In 1967, in a piece
139
 called Deia-vu Friars (Frailes Deia VuL Gurrola and
Jodorowsky walked from point X to the Hotel Tequendama
dressed as friars and singing psalms, in Bogota,
Colombia. In 1974, Gurrola perfomed Adhesive Tape
Cross on Stone (Cinta adhesiva en cruz sabre piedra), in
collaboration with Arnalda Cohen, and Geisen Gas. It
was included in the film Stealing Art (Robarte el Arte),
which was exhibited at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany.
1967 Galeria Pecanins
Founded in October 1964 by the Pecanins sisters, Maria
Teresa, Ana Maria, and Montserrat, who with their family,
moved to Mexico from Barcelona in 1950. The gallery
began its activities in Florencia Street in the Zona Rosa
neighborhood of Mexico City and moved to 103
Hamburgo Street in 1966, and to 186 Durango Street in
1984. Luis Carlos Emerich states:
Besides painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic arts,
photography, video, and collage as such, we should
consider Galeria Pecan ins as a precursor in Mexico
of installation, ambient art, obiect-art (durable,
consumable, or perishable), performance art and
live actions, among other modes that are not easily
pigeonholed even today, such as consumable art
which stimulated the creative environment of the
1970s and 1980s, privileging the creative endeavor
rather than the commercial goal of their venture .Jo
1967 Ephemeral Mural, Jose Luis Cuevas
Of the artists from the Rupture Generation (Generacion
de Ia Ruplura), Jose Luis Cuevas, who had a long non-
obiectual career, is one of the most important precursors
of the first performances that had a social impact not
on ly through cultural circuits, but also through th e media.
Many were simple acts of exhibitionism, but others
recognized them as artist actions in the purest,
Mexican, pre-non-obiectual style. Let us remember also
his ephemeral mural: the framing of the Zona Rosa as
a geographical space whe re artists and writers could
circulate, his conceptual determination The Cactus Curtain
(La Cortina de NopaiL his independent candidacy, his
graphic marking of cattle, the exhibition of his semen,
and th e tattooing of women.
140
Cuevas is perhaps the only visual artist who attained the
popularity typical of movie actors, boxers, and fam ous
TV characters. He gained this popularity through actions
and provocations, debates, and articles whose structu res
were in the spirit of the happenings and improvisations
of the 1970s, which openly used alogical narratives fu ll
of references to local culture and gossip. Cuevas's
actions fostered the idea that visual artists in Mexico
have a public presence beyond art circuits.
In 1967, his Ephemeral Mural (Mural efimero) became
a popular street festival, advertised in the media in
advance by Galeria Misrachi . The public was invited to
congregate on the corner of Genova and Londres streets
in the well-known Zona Rosa neighborhood of Colonia
1
Juarez in Mexico City. The space became a meeting
place for intellectuals and artists. The mural was produced 1
on a billboard that previously had only been used for
advertising , and was located on the top of a buildi ng. Its J
goal was to be "a response to the stale Muralism of the
Mexican School." According to notes published in the
newspapers, fans, sales people, followers, onl ookers, 1
ambulances, firemen, and policemen attended th e event,
along with hundreds of other people. The happening 1
received wide media coverage. JJ
I
1968 First Salon de los lndependientes
This event was a response to the Salon Solar, a porollel
exhib ition offic ial ly orga ni zed for the Olym pics in
Mexico Ci ty. It opened on October 15 at th e CE:n tro
Isidro Fabel a of Son Angel , Mexico City, with worl_c. Ly
I
numerous artists, among them Felipe Ehrenberg , H.'l.,n
Escobedo, and Manuel Felguerez 32 I
The exhibitions at Salon de los lndependienles ought
out new relationships between art and an evolving society.
J
Its independence from all official and private institutions
did not preclude collaboration with organization and
people. The Salon did not have political or comm ercial
goals. It was international on account of the various ]
nationalities of the founding members, as well as through
the exchanges and collaborations with artists from other
countries. The iury system used at the time was reiected, J
as it was perceived to be often manipulated by non-
artistic inlerests. The absolute dir·ection of the Salon wu s
Proceso Pentagono (Jose Antonio HernandezAmezcua with Carlos Finck, Victor Munoz, and Orlando Mendicutti).
Oesapa•ccido(Disappeared). Palacio de Bellas Artes. Mexico City, Mexico. July- September. 1973
in th e ha nds of the general assembly. There were two
more Sa lons in 1969 (where the so-called "Arte Otro"
appeared with artists like Sebastian, Hersua, and
Luis Agu ilar Ponce), and the last, in 1970, was dedicated
to Arte Pove ra.
196· Helen EscobedoJJ
Her urban installation Doors to the Wind (Puertas a/
viento) measured nearly six feet tall and was made of
concreie. It was part of the Olympic Route located in the
area of Cuemanco, Periferico Sur. It was her first non-
objectua l piece that was not sculptural. Later, wh ile
Escobedo was director of the Museo Universitario, she
was a Com missar for the X Biennale des Jeunes Artistes
in Pari , wh ich included the group Proceso Pent6gono
(Pen tag on Process), Grupo TAl (Taller de Arte e
ldeologia or Workshop of Art and Ideology), and Grupo
Tetraed ro (Tetrahedron). This had a strategic importance
for th e Groups Movement.
1968 Anticonference: "Why_ I Paint the
Way I do" (performance antifactum)
This action was performed by Felipe Ehrenberg in th e
gazebo of the Alameda Central in the Galeria de Ia
Ciudad de Mexico as part of th e show Kinekaligrafica.
In 1973 , Ehrenberg exhibited himself as part of hi s
exhibit Gum, Chocolate, and Peanut Arts (Artes Chicles,
Chocolates y Cacahuates) in the Sa/a Ponce of the Palace
of Fine Arts (the Palacio de Bellas Artes) in Mexico City>~
Th e artist confirmed the following about his work: "Ever
since I've practiced PIAS Forms I have used, as a direct
reference, the Mexican open air markets known as
tianguis, the Day of th e Dead altars, arts and crahs, and
street performers from Mexico and Latin America, Loco
Valdes, and all manner of popular eccentrici~' without
which the country would have long disappeared.":J-
1968 Marcos Kurtycz36
Born in Poland, he arrived in Mexico in 1968. This same
year he met other radical Polish intellectua ls in Mexico,
141
 such as Ludwik Margules, Jan Zych, Maria Sten, and
Mariana Yampolsky. He developed works using new
media, such as Visual Algorithms (Aigoritmos Plasticos,
1968), which he exhibited in Wspolczesna Contemporary
Gallery in Warsaw, Poland. That same year he exhibited
Thermolithographs (Termografias) at Galeria Yon in
Mexico City. In 1979 he created one of his key works The
Death of the Printer, Artifact (La muerte del impresor,
artefacto) for the Annual Salon of Experimentation
organized by lnstituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) .
1971 Tribuna de Pintores [Painters' Tribune)
The Direcci 6n de Acci6n Cultural y Social (Office for
Cultural and Social Action) of the Government of Mexico
City opened the Tribuna de Pintores (Painters ' Tribune) on
February 7, 1971 . It was located on the esplanade of
Chapultepec Park, where the Museo Rufino Tamayo is
now located . Every Sunday, artists and visitors would
gather there, among them David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jose
Luis Cueva , Gilberta Aceves Navarro, Federico Silva ,
Mario Orozco Rivera , Vlady, Benito Messeguer, Pedro
Cervantes, Fanny Rabel, Lucio Cola, and others. There
was already talk of art in the streets, ephemeral art,
and group work at that time, and some of the artists
developed actions in front of a sizeable audience, th ereby
eliciting declarations, discussions, and controversy.
1973 Tepito Arte Ac6 (Tepi to Art Here)
Formed by cultural promoter·, Alfonso Hernandez; visual
artist, Dani el Manrique; and photographer, Car·los
Plascencia, this collective populari zed the motto, "Get
to know Mexico, vi sit Tepito." Tepito was one of th e
toughest neighborhoods in Mexico City, and was
constituted above all by street vendors, but it became
one of the most im portant cultural centers of the decade .
Manrique painted several murals the re, in collaboration
with neig hborhood residents.
1973 Peyote y Ia Campania
(Peyote and Company)
Adolfo PatinoJ directed and coordinated thi s collective
1 developed the project The TACO of the Brave Bitch (EI
(with Carla Rippey, Rogelio Villarreal, and Armando
Cristeto) that represented and offered an image or
Iii?
concept for many expectations of the time. In 1971 he
made an experimental video piece with Peyote y Ia Cia
titled They Cry in Los Angeles Too (Los Angeles tambit2n
/loran). This inconclusive film is about a character who
faces society's violent vices. Later, Patino founded th e
Nucleo de Fot6grafos lndependientes (Nucleus of
Independent Photographers). This collective was made up
of twenty Mexican photographers who organized traveling
exhibits and photography sessions in the street. He also
created several independent spaces, among them La
Agencia (The Agency), in which he promoted young artists.
1
1974 TAl: Taller de Arte e ldeologia l
(Workshop of Art and Ideology)
TAl was formed by a diverse group .Ja Their ideologue
was Alberto Hijar, philosopher, art critic, and professor
J
at UNAM's School of Architecture and Aesthetic s.
It operated first as a workshop for ana lysis and 1
dissemination of Marxist aesthetics. It was later dedicated
to stagi ng plays and to collective art co ntributio ns
intended to help liberation movements such as th ose in
I
Vietnam and Central America.
J
1974 TIP: Taller de lnvestigaci6n Pl6stica ]
(Visual Research Workshop) in
Morelia, Michoac6n ~9
They worked intensively creating worksh ops and mu w!, I
in th e farmi ng comm un iti es of Nayarit and Mich oacu ·
Mex ico. W ith organi zations such as Pur·epecha, Mi :<..:. ,
and Nahuatl, they wor·ked to protect comm unal la n<''
I
and ariiculate traditiona l cu lture as a means c,
defending their territo ry. They organized comm un i t~' J
museums in th e Tarasco plateau of Michoaca n and in
Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, until 1984. Some of I 1e!.
most impressive wo rb were non-objecl uu l pr-; c.c ,
whose impact had political re percussions th at v\ C -~
favorable for th e communities of Michoaca n.
1974 Cesar Espinosa and Araceli Zunig a
In this year, Cesar Espinosa and Araceli Zuni ga
J
TACO (Taller de Arte y Comunicacion) de Ia Perra
Brava) .-1o From artistic li bera lism to popular cu lture, th is J
 Senuuional m/JRIJ o m«ntJ
No Gru po with Carlos Zerpa, Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot), Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas San Carlos,
Ulli ~e r;idad ~J ac i on al cle Mexico, OJ, Mexico, January 19, 1982
proj ect was developed in three phases. To Each His
Own (A coda quien lo suyo, 197 4) consisted in editing
a li terary and cultural politics magazine for fiction
writers and journalists. For Conceptualism, Like It or Not
(Conceptualismo a huevo, 1975), they agreed to write
the hi story of the failur·e of The Story of the Bitch (EI
proce o de Ia perra). They called a meeting in the
com r rc nity center of Angel Parr-a, and planned a public
action with a conceptua list project that did not work. At
th e O;ld of that year, Cultura Sindical (Union Culture)
was n lecture series they held on this topic. During the
co nfi ict betwee n the State, the head of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), and the monopoly on private
tel e is :on (Televisa) , the Escuela Sindical (Union School)
org mized a serie s of colloquia that were titled, Mass
/v1e t:o and Popular Communication, through which a
pe• -n ent event was established under· the slogan "Li ve
ne\ · ;Japer against information and response" (1976).
1975 Meeting of Zacoalpan, Morelos
With th e goal of organizing an exhibit of conceptual art,
th e art theoretician Juan Acha invited several artists to
partrc ipate in a meeting that took place in the house of
ttJ t i Ja.qrcd1 rtdnt~ tit. I m~Utl i t adt. mor:itrl!l(J
Ju tt(j i1 q, tMrl rM 82. a ias ~ 30 fi'''i
i.Jf,:l l , , al.,~tt crt. m lr..u. , 'f
. •••••o• •••••
the painter Zalathiel Vargas in Zacoalpan, a small town
in the state of Morelos. This yielded an encounter
between young creators from various career paths which
had been working in different areas. Carlos Finck and
Victor Munoz met there, who, together with Jose Antonio
Hernandez, had been trained at La Esmeralda Art
School, and had worked on a few installati ons together.
Among the oth er·s who gath ered there were Ruben
Valencia and Al fredo Nunez from th e Academ v of San I
Carlos, who had been working with Geometrism and
Conceptualism and were the future founders of the No
Grupo; Cesar Espinosa, Araceli Zu niga , and Aaron
Flores of TACO de Ia Perr·a Bravo and ephemeral
members of Arte Aco (Art Here); Felipe Ehrenberg, ex-
member of the Salon de los lndependientes and
cofounder of the two English groups: Beau Geste Press
(on e of the first to produce artists' books and mail art)
and Taller Poligono (Polygon Workshop); and Zalathiel
Vargas, an enthusiastic promoter of alternative projects
and had a long career working on comics, including
illustratating Jodorowsky's Panic Fables (Fabulas Panicas),
and many others. The coalition that began there
lasted only six months, but it showed the need to find
interrelationships among artists th at fra med a different
143
 type of visual production. As a result of the Zacoalpan
meeting, two new groups formed: El Colectivo (The
Collective) and Proceso Pent6gono.
197 6 Grupo Proceso Pent6gono
(Pentagon Process)
Members included visual artists Carlos Aguirre; Felipe
Ehrenberg; Carlos Finck; Jose Antonio Hernandez;
Rowena Morales; Victor Munoz, who was also a
theoretician; the filmmaker Miguel Ehrenberg; and
photographer, Lourdes Grobet. Their installation,
Pentagon (Pentagono, 197 6-1977)4o for the XX Bienal
de Paris consisted of a five-walled, pentagon-shaped
booth that the public cou ld enter and locate objects and
al lu sive images related to repression in Latin American
countries. The installation order of the objects and images
could be altered by the public, thereby modifying the
discourse in some way. A table and chairs coded as if for
an administrative inventory and painted in military colors,
electrical torture devices, and other things, circled the
inner perimeter of the pentagon. The installation consisted
of 2000 pieces. It was duplicated to be simultaneously
exhibited at UNAM's Museo Universitario de Ciencias y
Artes and the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris.
197 6 Grupo Sumo (Sum)
The members of this group met at Mexico City's Escuela de
San Ca rlos (School of San Car·los) in the Tall er de
Experimentaci6n Visual y Pintura Mural (Workshop of
Visual Experimentation and Mural Painting) under the
leadership of the painter and educator Ricardo Rocha. 4,
They then moved from the classroom to the street in order
to bring their paintings to the urban public and experiment
in front of passers-by. Socially-oriented, but not belonging
to any particular group or party, Gr·upo Sumo's works
evolved from an initial abstract style to a figurative realism
that was influenced by their surroundings. They used
stencils to write on wa lls and sidewalks, and also
implemented photographic collage, objects, and found
texts in the streets. Some of the members later abandoned
the group in order to concentrate on their personal projects
and enter the commercial art market. The group produced
numerous ephemeral works, mostly mural paintings on
Mexico Cily walls. In the Escuela Nacional de Artes
144
Pl6sticas (National School of Plastic Arts, UNAM) and San
Carlos workshops, they also produced unique artist's
books and object-books .
Grupo Mira (Look)
From its founding, the Mira Group 43 came togeth er with
the idea of gathering the experiences of vari ou s
participants into a graphic project about viole nce in
Mexico City. This project was proposed for participation
in Salon de Experimentacion organized by INBA, but
the selection committee rejected it.
No Grupo (No Group)
The No Grupo was active from 1977 to 1983. It roe
out of the 'group fever' reigning at the time, and the
meetings in the home of the sculptor Cuenado Hersua,
who.was invited to participate in an event paying
homage to master artist Gunther Gerszo at the Solon de
lnvitados (Guests Salon). He extended this invitation lo
those of us who met regularly at his studio, which is ho v
the first No Grupo event came to be. After the second
presentation, various participants separated an d only
four members remained for the Salon de Experimentacion
(Salon of Experimental Art )44
Between 1979 and 1983 we carried out eleven projects.
At each one, we drafted texts that were distri b1 1'ed
among the public, along with small objects that allo\'ed
the public to contribute and produce something plo/iul
and amusing. For us, humor was a very se rious lh.q
that was always part of our events which, starti n:_: :1
1979, we called the Installation of Visual Mo me r , ~
(Montaie de Momentos Plasticos). In addition to the
texts, we also made signs and flyers. The ob j, c!s
presented our visual thesis and hypothesis and wer8
elaborated through very cheap materials. ,Js
The No Grupo contributed to various reviews, such as
LACE (Los Angeles) and Artes Visuales of the Museo dP.
Arte Moderno (Mexico), with texts and graphic projecij
while simu ltaneously producing artistic work. Therefore,
we communally reviewed the articles in the newspa pers
and sent letters in order to spread the word. Each ti me
we succeeded in gaining more press coverag e. !11
 Polvo de Gallina Negra, Madre par un dfa (Mother for a Dar), on tile morning show Nuestro Mundo (Our World)
with host Gui llermo Ochoa, Televisa studios, Mexico City, Mexico, Summer 1987
198 1, we were invited to participate in the First Latin
Ameri ca n Symposium of Non-Objectual Art (Primer
Coloquio Latinoamericano de Arte No-Obietual), whose
president was Juan Acha. 4o
197 Grupo Mar~o (Frame Group)
While Sebastian was a teacher at UNAM's Escuela
Nacional de Artes Plasticas, he organized a group for city
evenb. Members of this group were Sebastian, Mogoli
Lara, tl\anuel Marin, Gilda Castillo, Mauricio Guerrero,
and Alejandro Olmedo. The group was active from 1978
to 1980 and they developed a series of actions using
poem5 they called Topographic Poems (Poem as
Topograficos), wh ich allowed for audience participation .
1979 First and only Salon de Experimentaci6n
Organ ized by Oscar Urrutia who was in charge of
INBA's Vis ual Arts Department.
1979 The Taco Patent, Maris Bustamante4~
This was the first social performance presented on
commercial television, Televiso . It was based on a
conceptua l work that pays homage to the pre-Columbian
gastronom ical invention , and it was patented with the
General Registry of Author's Rights in Mexico City. I (the
author) declared myself, "the universa l owner of the
formal and visual image of the taco."
1983-93 Grupo Polvo de Gallina Negra
Th is was a feminist art group founded by Monico
Mayer4s and Moris Bustamante. W ith a long tra jectory
as a feminist and a visua l artist, Moyer has created
noteworthy non-objectuol works . In 197 4, her action
They Expose Themselves (Se exponen) was presented
as a parallel activity to the exhibi t by first-year visual arts
students at ENAP. Several artists in the exhibition
participated in a performance tha t included sticking
photocopied invitations to the show on which was
in serted th eir individual photog rofJhs nd their UNAM
145
 student ID number. They also made a big cake that was
placed in the midd le of the exhibition hall and decorated
with confetti and streamers . Additionally, she created her
famous insta llati on The Clothesline (fl tendedero) in 1978
at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno for the show
New Trends (Nuevas Tendencias). This work consisted of
a pink clothesline, nearly ten feet by ten feet. Ordinary
wooden clothespins were used to hang pink notes upon
which hundreds of women answered the question: "As a
woman, the th ing I most hate about my city is ... "
The group Po lvo de Gallina Negra (PGN) worked
continuous ly from 1983 to 199 1 and one of our first
actions consisted of the group's participation in social
protests . The first action was a protest against rape and
took place on October Jth, 1993 at the publ ic memorial,
Hem iciclo a Juarez.
The name of the group refers to the herbs and powders
sold in small packets by medicine women in traditional
Mexican markets and promise absolute protection from
the "evil eye." Relati ng th e "evil eye" to our profession
as visua l artists and in the midst of brutal Mexican
machismo was quite funny and sarcastic, and thus we
promoted the name.
PGN 's aims were to: change the image of women in the
mass media through actions m performances in radio ,
television, and the printed press; recover the work of
contemporory women arti sts and tho se from the past;
and defen d the living conditions and rights of women in
a patriarchal soc iety and our Mexican milieu in particular,
through non-objectual art proposals addressing the topics
of dom estic labor, maternity, and the quinceoiiero
com ing-of-age celeb ra ti on. " '
Un doubtedly th e action wh ich helped defin e th e
group 's wo rk -a nd caused a great stir nationally an d
rnternationally- was th e project Mothers For a Day
(Madres por un dia, 1987), which we performed on
commercial te levision as part of the project Mothers!
(;Madres !). We picked Guillermo Ochoa, a we ll-known
TV journa li st and anchor, whom I knew from my 1979
project Taco Potent. The performance consisted of turning
him into a "mother for a day," for which he agreed to
wRor an apron with an artificiol pregnant belly for about
146
twenty minutes so Mr. Ochoa became the firs t Mexican
man impregnated by the only group of femini st arti sts
in Mexico.sr
1985 Nucleo Postarte (Mail Art Nucleus):
Primera Bienallnternacional de Poesia
Visual y Experimental (First International
Biennial of Visual and Experimental Poetry)
The activities of th is group were main ly carri ed out
thanks to the stimu lus and efforts of Cesar Espinosa and
Araceli Zuniga.
In view of the almost non-existent experience and
practice of visual poetry experimentation in th is
country, the working group Nucleo-Post-Art<=>
(Cesar Espinosa , coordinator, Araceli Zuni ga ,
Leticia Ocharan , Maria Eugenia Guerra , Cosme
Ornelas and Jorge Ro sa no) sent out in 1985 a call
to artists announcing the Primero Bienal de Poesio
Visual y Experimental de Mexico, since those
discip lin es practically were unheard of in our
national context. Other than the exhibit of
international concrete poetry promoted by Math ias
Goeritz in 1966, and another one devoted to
Brazilian concrete poetry in the mid-1970s, th e
attempts to link the efforts of visual artists with th ose
who practice the written word have been scarce
and unsuccessful s:
The show was scheJuled to open in 1985, bul bec01·:e
of th e Mex ico City earthquake, it was postponed uniil
1986. More tha n 1500 works, by almost 500 aulht. rs
from forty coun tr·ies were received , including com plete
se ts of works, books, magazines , collectors' editi ons,
prints, objects, etc ·· The pieces were based on
etters, visual onomatopoeia, signs and geometry, texts
and letters weaved with drawings, stamp work,
mimeographs , and photocopies. Eight bien nial s hc- v,
been organized thus for.
1989 Artefax I and Artefax II, Mail Arr-1
In the month of February, thirty years after Mail Art, the
project Artefox was presented in the context of the
exhibit Electrosensitivity (Eicctrosonsibilidad), at Escu .. 1
I

Fra··,,, . ")· ·..S, ,tunsl!l Tounsl), Zticolu. IVlexico Cily, rvle-lco. 199 /

147

Santiago Sierra, 465 Paid People, Mus eo Rufino Tamayo, Sala 7, Mexico City, Mexico, October 1999
Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, La Esmeralda.
It was a previously arranged exchange between the
head office of Ia Esmeralda and the cities of Baltimore
(Maryland), Copenhagen (Denmark), and the inner part
of Mexico City. Fax numbers and transmission schedules
were set up for the day of the opening. Twelve artists
from the cities mentioned participated in the action
through phone appointments .
For the project we termed Artefax fl,ss we extended
phone invitations to nine artists who sent their works from
various loca tions in Mexico City. The works were also
received during the opening of the show Compudiarte
'89s6 As the works were received, th e audience was
able to view them one by one. Both exhibits (Artefax I
and /~ also showed what was being done in terms of the
use of computers in art and design at the University's
Azcapotza lco campus. Th ese exh ibi ts disrupt the id ea of
non-objectual art. The mediation of the fa x machine in
the physical presentation of the work makes it become
dematerialized, thereby becoming a vision of what an
author may express from a remote location s:
I
I
I
Opening of Museo X-Teresa
Located in the Antiguo building of the Hospital de Jesus
in the Historic district of Mexico City, this was th e first
museum devoted to non-ob jectual art and wa s
established by Eloy Tarcisio, who conceived the project )
and brought it to fruition.
Tarcisio was the first Director and had already developed
l
a long trajectory as a promoter of avant-garde vi sual
arts. sa He was the co-founder of INBA's Centro para Ia l
lnvestigaci6n y Experimentaci6n Visual (Center for Vi s al
Research and Experimentation, 1977-1978). Then, ]
between 1986 and 1987, he organized alternative art
exhibits in his Mexico City stud io at Licenciado Verdad
No. 11-15. Later, from 1987 and 1988, he worked as
curator for the Museo de Arte Moderno, in Mexico Ci ty
and in 1992 coordinated the performance competiti on at
the Museo Universitario del Chopo (The Museu m of !he
University of Chopo). The creation of the Museo X-Teres
institutionalized non-objectual art in the country. I
J

J
1 "Non-Objectual Art (Artes No-Objetuales) was a term proposed by the art theorist Juan Acha and used mainly in Latin Americ .
2 I co-founded No Grupo with Alfredo Nunez, Melquiades Herrera and Ruben Valencia. The group was active from 1977 to 1983. J
3 I co-founded the the group Polvo de Gallina Negra with Monica Mayer. The feminist art group was active from 1983 to 1993.
4 I believe that the so-called Generaci6n de Ia Ruptura (Generation of Rupture, 1963-1975) did not really cause a ruptu re, but
rather substituted artists from one generation with those of another. Artists belonging to this group came togeth er in gn t; p J
shows, not for the purpose of finding new forms of expression, but rather to find a place in the international art market.
5 Mesoamerican duality is an order and cosmology symbolized by Coatlicue, the dual goddess of Mexico culture.
6 I was a professor at Universidad Aut6noma Metropolitana Unidad Azcapotza lco for thirty years in the Division of Design .Arts
and Sciences, Department of Evaluation of Design in Time.

148
 7 Since 1993, I have carried out research that was gathered in Primer lnventario de las Form as Pi as en Mexico (Performance,
instalaci6n y ambientaci6n 1922-1993). Not yet published.
8 As contemporary alogical artists, we identify more with them than with the Mexican Muralist Movement because the estridentistas
lived and created non-objectual situations while the second group produced objects.
9 Transdisciplines have been developed for fiheen years at Centro Nacional de las Aries (CENART-CONACULTA) and Fundaci6n
de CAHCTAS, S.C. Centro de Aries Humanidades y Ciencias en Transdisciplina, the first center of its kind in Mexico City:
www.cahctas.org.
10 Excerpted from my text Arbol Genealogico de las Formas Pias, 1998.
11 Ba sed on conversations between German List Arzubide and the author, Mexico City, 1994. German List Arzubide and Luis
Mario Schneider have extensively written on the Estridente Movement. See: German List Arzubide, "EI Movimiento Estridentista,"
Lecturas Mexicanas (Mexico D.F.: Secretarla Educaci6n Publica, num. 7 6, 1987); German List Arzubide, El Movimiento
Estridenlista, ed. facsimilar (Mexico D.F.: Federaci6n Editorial Mexicana, 1980); Luis Mario Schneider, El Estridentismo, Mexico
1921- 1921 (Mexico D.F.: lnstituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, UNAM, 1985).
12 Miguel Hidalgo was a Mexican Roman Catholic priest and revolutionary rebel leader. He is regarded by most Mexican people
as the "Father of the Country" and was the founder of the Mexican War of Independence movement, which fought for
independence from Spain in the early ninteenth century.
13 He was promptly joined by German List Arzubide, Arqueles Vela, Luis Quintanilla (who always signed "Kin Taniya"),
Salvador Gallardo, Miguel Aguillon Guzman, Francisco Orozco Munoz, Salvador Novo, and Humberto Rivas, in literature.
Ra mon Alva de Ia Canal, Leopolda Mendez, Fermin Revueltas, Diego Rivera, German Cueto, Jean Chariot, Roberto Montenegro,
Guillermo Ruiz, Javier Guerrero, and Maximo Pacheco, in painting. They were also joined by the musicians Manuel M. Ponce
and Silvestre Revueltas.
14 Tf:XI by Arqu eles Vela, Universalllustrado, November 12, 1925.
15 1bid.
16 1lJid
171b:d
18 Lu is Cervantes Morales, Memorias de Carlos Balmori (Mexico D.F.: Tafferes de Costa-Amic Editor, 1969).
19 Laura Gonzalez Matute has done extensive research on this topic, recovering docum ents and photographs from the period.
20 The youngest daughter of Guadalupe Marin, first wife of Diego Rivera (1924), Isabel Marin was the wife of Wolfgang Paalen,
an Austrian artist and intellectual who participated with Breton in the Surrealist movement in Paris in 1936. He sought exile
in Mexico in 1940.
21 ;\mong them, the photographer Lordes Grobe!, at the Universidad lberoamericana, and the sculptor Sebastian, at UNAM's
·:hoof of Architecture.
22 .. . s de Satelite (Satellite Hills) is a ~' p i cof development of the Desarrollista period under the governmen t of Miguel Aleman
,: es ident 1946-19 52); it is loco ted in Noucolpan de Juarez, in the northem part of the city.
2: ·::e Museo Experim ental Ef Eco (1952 -1 953), spon sored by Daniel Mont, wos concei ved as a mu seum space, which
;.. : fuded services of a restaurant and a bar. Thi s followed Goeri tz's idea of integration a coordina tion of archit ectu re an d
·::>ual arts, as well as li terature and music. See Mathias Goeritz, Un artista plural. Ideas y dibuios, ed Graciela Kartofef
(Mexico D.F. Conaculta, 1992) .
2Ll The UNAM's President at the time was Dr. Guillermo Sober6n Acevedo
25 The first gallery in Mexico City was lnes Amar's in 1935. Later, Gaferia Pro teo opened around 1954 and Antonio Souzo in 19 59 .
26 .i was at Gaferia de Antonio Souza where, during the 1960s, the most interesting events took place.
2/ '.lejandro Jodorowsky, "Hacia ef 'efimero' panico o iSacar ef teatro del teatro!, " prologue in Teatro p6nico (Mexico DJ Era, 1965).
2E Manuel Felguerez, Arnalda Cohen, and Geisen Gas, interviews with the author, Mexico City, 1994-1997.
29 Juan Jose Gurrola was on actor, theater director, filmmaker, opera director, and promoter of alternative art in Mexico.
3( Excerpt from Luis Carlos Emeri ch and Galeria Pecanins, Galeria Pecanins, Ia siempre vivaz (Mexico D.F.: Turner Libros, 2000).
31 Jose Luis Cuevas, inte rview with the author, Museo Cuevas, Mexico City, 1997. See: Maris Bustamante, "EI mural efimero de
Jose Lui s Cuevas, t1einta anos despues," Revista Viceversa (Mexico D.F. abril, 1997).

149
 32 The following artists participated: Juan Lu is Bunuel, Myra Landau, Arnalda Coen, Toni Sbert, Felipe Ehrenberg, Kasuya Sakai,
Francisco Corzas, Francisco lcaza, Francisco Moreno Capdevil la, Mariano Rivera Velazquez, Helen Escobedo, Man uel
Felguerez, Roger von Gunten, Fernando Garcia Ponce, Gilberta Aceves Navarro, Gabriela Ramirez, Gaston Gonzalez, Lilia
Carrillo, Alberto Gironella, Leonel Gongora, Rafael Corone l, Antonio Espana, Felipe Orlando, Enrique Echeverria, lker
Larrauri, Arnold Belkin, Lucinda Urrusti, Benito Messeguer, Pedro Preux, Vita Giorgi, Lucas Johnson, Luis Jaso, Philip Bragar,
Jose Munoz Medina, Ricardo Rocha, Regazzoni, Marta Palau, Olivier Seguin, Bartoli, Brian Nissen, Vicente Roio and Luis
Lopez Loza. The foll owing artists donated works but were not in the exhibition: Jose Luis Cuevas, Angela Gurria, Guillermo
I
Meza and Leonora Carrington.
33 Escobedo defines herself as an environmental sculptor. She studied at Mexico City College, taking sculptu re classes from
German Cueto. She received a 3-year scholarsh ip for the Royal College of Art, Sculpture Department, in London, England In
1954 she rece ived the ARCA (Associate of the Royal College of Art) Diploma. She was Director of the Department of Vi sua l
Arts Department of UNAM's Museo Univeristario, and Coordinator of Museums and Galleries at UNAM; Technical Director of
Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) from 1981 to 1982, and Director of Museo de Arte Moderno from 1982 to 1984. She
was a researcher at Centro de Experimentacion en Arte Urbano, in Mexico, from 1980 to 1981. From its founding in 1979,
she participated with a group of sculptors at Espacio Escultorico, UNAM, Mexico, D.F. She was elected Associate Member of
the Academie Royale de Sciences, Lettres et Beaux Artes de Belgique in 1986. In 1991 she received a Guggenheim Fellows hip.
34 Ehrenberg was an apprentice or assistant to John Martin (Canada), Erich Duooen (Germany); had an unfinished degree from
the Escuelas de Artesanias EDA/INBA with the teachers Jose (painter) and Tomas (sculptor) Chavez Morado and the Brazilian
Emiliano di Cavalcanti. He later experimented on his own. He was a founding member of the Polygonal Workshop in Englanu
from 1969 to 1971. He founded Beau Geste Press which was active from 1970 to 197 4. He closely followed the work of
Fluxus from 1970 onwards. He was a founding member of Grupo Proces Pentagono from 1976 to 1983, and found ed uf
Talleres de Comunicacion Halos (H20) Ornos from 1980 to 1983. Ehrenberg is a honorary member of Artis las mexicanos
de Pintura Aerosolografica (AMPA) in 1989.
35 Felipe Ehrenberg, interview with the author, Mexico City, 1994-1997.
36 Kurtycz was born Jan Kurtycz Tiefenbruner in Pielgrzymowice, in the Pszczyna district in Poland. He came from a Jewish farnil)'
that hod converted to Catholicism . Most of his maternal relatives died in the Holocaust. In 1952 he obtained a technical degree
as a machinist and in 1957 he received his industrial engineering degree from Warsaw Polytechnic. From 1958 to 196 1, he
carried out research in the field of technical metrology in the Institute for Mechanical Precision in Warsaw. He arrived in Tamp icu,
Mexico in September 1968 on the Polanica transatlantic and in October he asked for a 60-day visa extension. He became c
Mexican citizen in the year 1980. In July 1990, he was diagnosed with a neurinoma of the facial nerve (a brain tumor), which
required surgery. He began a close friendship and patient relationship with Dr. Carlo Pane, collaborating with him on ht
design of the presentation of his case for a congress . In April 1991 he had surgery for the tu mor.
J
37 Patino was self-taught. He organized the group Peyote y Ia Campania and the Nucleo de Fotografos lndependientes (Pati no,
Cristeto, Lourdes Grabel, among others) In 1977 he participated in Secci6n Biena/ de Grafica, Salon Nocional de Arhs
Plaslicas, Museo Nacionol de Bellas Aries, INBA, Mexico City.
38 TAl was formed by Isabel Estel a Campos, community member, Ar-iadne Gallardo, iournalist, Jose Luis Gutierrez Peno, ' ,;,
teacher, Cresencio iv\endez Gaspar, historian, Juan Manuel Olivos Campos, art teacher, Rene Olivos, government admini str, " ,,
Jose Lui s Soto, visual artist, and Ignacio Eleazar Soto Campos, visual artist.
39 TIP 's members were union leader Jorge Bustillos, art historian Armando Castellanos, filmmaker Adriana Contreras, visua l r ';
Enri<.Jue Echeverria , philosophy professor Gsar Galvez, theoritician Alberto Hijar, historian Cecilia Lazcano, visual artist F::~: 1,
Leal, film critic Andres de Luna, theater professor Ana Maria Martinez, internationalist, Dolores de las Penas, social scicn'i,t 1
Maria Isabel Perez, graphic artist Rini Templeton, designer Atilio Tu is, and philosophy professor Alberto Vargas.
40 TACO is the Spanish acronym f r the Art and Com mun icati on Workshop .
41 Th e crentors were Feli pe Ehrenberg, Carlos Finck, Jose Antonio Hernc111dez Amezc ua and Victor Munoz, :n coll abor-:r: "
with Miguel Ehrenberg.
42 The members of this group we re visual artists Oscar Aguilar Olea, Jose Barbosa, Paloma Diaz Abreu , Rene Freire, Ol' ·,
Hinoiosa , Arrnandina Lozano, Gabriel Macotela, Ernesto Molina, Alfonso Moraza, Cesar Nuiiez, Hirman Ramirez, ArmOP'- ,
Ram os, Mario Rangel Faz, Santiago Rebolledo, Jesus Reyes Cordero, Jaime Rodriguez, Arturo Rosales, Patricia Salas, 1 Ji
Vida l, and Alma Valtierra, art restoration specialist, and Guadalupe Zobarzo, filmmaker
43 The members were Arnulfo Aquino Casas, Eduardo Garduno, Melesio Galvan, Rebeca Hidalgo, Saul Martinez, Salvr de .
Paleo, Silvia Paz Paredes, and Jorge Perez Vega.

150
 Maris Bustamante, Melquiades Herrera, Alfr~do Nunez, and Ruben Valencia. Although Katya Mandoky was still in the group it
44
was decided that she wou ld not part1c1pate 1n the fmal seleclion to announce a wm ner. Th e No Group re1ected the structure of
competitions and in its place we decided to do a collective action. During th is presentation, however, Mandoky performed her
own action, which consisted of place a subject in a cage. This caused the defin itive separation of the group. As for the rest of the
group, aher participating in the exhibition The Death of Performance (1983), in the Museo de Arte Moderno, we decided to
separate the following December: Alfredo Nunez went to live in Los Angeles, California, and the other stayed in Mexico City. Ruben
Valencia, who was my partner smce 1977, was d1agnosed w1th cancer 1n 1990. Melqu1ades Herrera d1ed October 18, 2003.
45 Occasionally photographic film was used, which perm itted working on 1•1 sca le. Once a master was obtained, we reproduced
the images by heliographic machines that were mostly used for architectural plans, and they were very cheap. In this way we
were able to make very large works at a very low cost.
A6 Th is event took pla ce at the Museo de Arte Moderno of Medell in, Colombia. Notable Latin American action artists participated,
· such as Leopolda Maler, Marta Minujin and Juan Camilo Uri be, who recently passed away. From Mexico the followi ng groups
participated• Proceso Pentagon o; No Grupo, Magali Lara , the group Espacio Escultorico, Felipe Ehrenberg and Rita Ed er.
47 Maris Bustamante studied visual arts at the National School of Painting and Sculpture "La Esmeralda" from 1968 to 1973. At
age thirteen she began her painting and drawi ng lessons with the pain ter Angelina Groso, a former student of the Spanish
pa inter Jose Bardasano. In 1980 she began her academic teach ing career as a fu ll-time professor at Universidad Autonoma
Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco, where she worked for nearly 30 years . In 1990- 1991 she obtained FONCA's Beca de
Creadores lntelectuales y Artisticos.
48 Monica Mayer studied visual arts at UNAM's Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas (ENAP). In 1980 she obtained a master's in
art soc iology from Goddard College. For two years she participated in the Fem in ist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, California.
She founded the Author's Gallery "Pinto mi Raya" and Circuito Cultural Condesa. With a long career as a visua l artist and
fe mini st, she writes an art cri ti cism co lumn for the daily El Universal. Monica Mayer came from a family of women's rights
activists, among them her paterna l grandmother and her mother, who she wou ld accompany to marches and demonstrations .
49 We organized severa l proposals based on thematic pretexts, we gave lectures, sent invitations by mail and even fax, before
the use of email was common, to more than 300 people in a routine way, not only intellectuals and artists, but also people from
the media. We attended TV and radio programs and published articles in feminist reviews such as FEM. We gave countless
lectures, includ ing a se ri es of thirty-six outside Mexico City sponsored by the Department of Cultural Promotion of the Ministry
of Education. We titled this conference, Las muieres artistas mexico nos, o Se solicita esposa (Mexican Women Artists or Looking
for a Wife), since ma le artists trad itionally have a wife who al lows them to focus on their work .
50 jMadres! began May 10, 1987. To speak abou t maternity we needed to be pregnant, which we were able to ach ieve within
fou r months of each other, and our husbands support and "solidarity" was cruc ial.
51 This action was broadcast nationally and in terna tionally and seen by close to 200 million viewers. Phone lines were blocked
by the large volume of calls, many of which protested against the action, which they considered disrespectful of maternity.
52 Taken from the catalogue of the Bienal, pub lished by the Direccion General de Difusi on y Relaciones Publicas del Departamento
de! D'strito Federa l in December of 1986.
53 The works were presented in Auditorio "A " at the Zacatenco campus of lnstituto Poli tecnico Nacional, Pinacoteca de Ia
Univ ,, sidad Autonoma de Pueblo, Galer! a Ramon Alva de Ia Canal at Universidad Veracruzana, Villa Primavera at Universidad
de G J JCJalajara, and in the cultural spaces of Mexico Ci ty's Departamento del Distrito Federal.
54 The partic ipants in Artefax I included• from Denmark, Etienne Bondy and Dodi Romanty; from the Un ited States, D S. Bakker,
Richard El lsberry Tryzno, Steve Stes, Gabriele Hourticolon and Doug las Retzler-Eian; from Mexico, Maris Bustamante, Marco
A. G ,dinez "Tzara," Daniel Manzano, Cuauhtemoc Salgado and Mauricio Guerrero. Participants in Artefax II included• from
Mexi o, Maris Bustamante, Andrea di Castro, Aaron Flores, Alberto Gutierrez, Melquiades Herrera, Blanca Nova!, Cuauhtemoc
Salgado, Jose de Santiago, Sebastian and Mauricio Guerrero.
55 Participants in Artefax II• Maris Bustamante, Andrea de Castro, Amon Flores, Alberto Gutierrez, Melquiades Herrera, Blanca
Nova i, Cuauhtemoc Salgado, Jose de Santiago, Seba stia n and Mauricio Guerrero, all in Mex ico.
56 Presented on July 24 of the same year, at Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana's Metropolitan Ga ll ery
57 Ta ken from the report on Artefax prepared by Mauricio Guerrero and published in 1989 by Departamento de lnvestigacion y
Conocim ien to para el Diseno de Ia Division de Ciencias y Artes del Diseno, UAM-Azcapotzalco).
58 Eloy Tarcis io was born in 19 55 in Mexico City, and studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura "La
Esmeralda" from 1973 to 1977. He won first prize for painting in 1975 and notable mention in drawing in the X Concurso
Naciona l de Arte, and in 1981 received honorable mention at the Primer Encuentro de Arte Joven In 1992 he received the
FONC\ Award in the Category, "Intellectual and Artistic Creators ".

151
 Fragmented Corpus: Actions in Lima, 1966-2000
Sharon Lerner Rizo-Patr6n
Jorge Villacorta Chavez
The marriage between the avant-garde, as it had
been conceived in Peru, and new dematerializing art
trends in the mid-1960s was not easy. The situation
changed around 1965, partly due to lectures that the
Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest delivered during
several visits to Lima.l
1966-1978
In the field of performance art, there was not any
particularly significant activity in this period. According to
some, the first Happening in the Peruvian art scene was an
event that took place in an exhibition space called Adam's
Bellybutton (EI Ombligo de Adan) 2 The actor, Felipe
Buendia, wore a false presidential sash and presided over
the opening of a show by the group New Art (Arte Nuevo).
In official visual discourse, Andean handicrafts gained
sudden importance in the context of a cultural campaign
supported by the revolutionary government of Juan
Velasco Alvarado ( 1968-197 6) 3 The government
sponsored handicraft biennials starting in 1969 and
promoted "total art festivals." Interdisciplinary work was
perceived as the sign of a new era because of its
involvement with technology.
O n th e other hand , Lima witnessed a flourishing of
collective theater troupes in the 1970s. Some groups
focused on the corporeal and the gestural. A clear
example of the use of the body as an art medium occurred
in 1978 when the renowned poet Jorge Eduardo Eielson
(then based in Milan, Italy) devised a performance
entitled To Sleep is a Masterpiece (Dormir es una obra
maestro) held at Galeria 9. The performance is only
preserved by a photograph. The artist tied the body of
a model to a cot placed in a vertical position. He
experimented with using a knot-tying technique and a
sh eet in new ways and using a new temporality. This
performance is a sort of tableau vivant and is part
of an expanded view of poetry, which for Eielson
encompassed everyday life.
Colecti·.'o Snciedacl Civil, Lm,ala bandl'r,J (Wash the Flc~g), Plaza ~ 1ayor, Lima, PPru. Fric!J\ !:, t.~ 2y 21-- Nover.ll'cr ~s. '000
152
Other than this instance, an interest in the body as 0
creative medium for dematerialized art was uncommon.4
At the end of the 1970s, it was still not possible to make
a clear distinction between a theater acti on and
performance art in Lima.
1979-1990
From July 16 to 26, 1979, an exhibit entitled Sign x
Sign (Signo x Signa), featuring works by Wiley Ludeiia,
Hugo Salazar del Alcazar, Patricia Lopez Meri no, and
Armando Williams, presented by the Italian arch itect
Giuseppe Manigrasso, proposed a critical read ing
of the city of Lima. Sign x Sign suggested for the first
time that a utopia could be built on the basis of popular
urbanism . Several of the artists involved in the exhibitions I
carried out the intervention, Lima in a Tree (Lima en un
arbol, 1981) at the intersection of Nicolas de Pierola
and Rufino Torrico avenues. There, they placed a potted
eucalyptus tree attached with a rope to four light posts
on each of the crossing's four corners. This crea ted a
traffic jam for a few minutes, which called attention to
the changes the city was undergoing, including the loss
of green areas due to the accelerated (and lucrative)
sale of plots of land to developers .c
The first attempt to focus on the social by using the body
took place in 1983 , at an exhibit of the Associolio:1of
Visual Artists (Artistas Visuales Asociadas, AVA). :n a
performance, Jose Antonio Morales assumed the rnle of
a mental patient in order to highlight the social reprt:sc,ion
to which he was subjected.
During the decade of the 1980s, performances groJuai ly
retreated from public to pri vate spaces . In 1986, rlwi ·g
Alan Garcia's first administration, the guerrilla g.oup
Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) began its most
subversive activities in Lima. This situation was qu ickly
followed by an economic crisis and a climate of instability
and general chaos in the city.
 Rossana Agois, Wiley Ludeiia, Hugo Salazar del Alcazar, Armando Wil liams. Lima en un arbol (Lima in a Tree).
intersections of avenues Nicolas de Pierola and Rufino Torrico, Lima. Peru. 1981
Chaclacayo (1983-1990), a group formed by the
German artist Helmut Psotta and two young artists,
Sergio Zevallos and Raul Avellaneda, began exploring
the body and culture in the periphery of Lima. Their work
ranged from performance art executed in private spaces
(the home/studio) in front of the camera without an
audience to actions that spontaneously interacted with
passers-by in public spaces . The group sought the
extremes of representation by using crude images of
all levels of public violence: discrimination, racism , and
male chauvinism, among others. For this reason ,
Chaclacayo characterized its motivation as political.
They used photography in a photojournalistic style, as a
parallel to the images of violence that filled the front
pag es of newspapers. Th e group aimed to defin e a
beauty made up of obscenities and link it to a
magnificent and miserable dramatic mis-en-sd;ne that
resembled an opera of abjection.
Many of the first performances that were photographed
took place in a cemetery, thereby suggesting an erotic
fanta sy of promiscuity in death. In other performances
which took place on beaches, they associated the image
of Sa int Rosa of Lima with quasi-gothic rituals 9 These
were followed by other performances in 1986 and
1987, which were held in a small home that looked
like a prison cell. As an individual, Zevallos also created
performances that explored his political and sexual
identity in the public space, which were captured
by a street photographer. The only exhibition of
th e Chaclacayo collective took place in Lima at th e
154
Museo de Arte in 1984, and was sponsored by the
Goethe Institute. Museum officials partially censored the
show before the opening.
Jorge Eduardo Eielson closed the decade with an exh ibit
in Lima 10 that followed his one-man show at the Jo Bienal
de Truiillo. Interruption (lnterrupcion, 1988) wa s
performed the day his one-man show opened at th e
Centro Cultural de Ia Muni cipal idad Miraflores, which
included his installation The Infinite Landscape of
1
Coastal Peru (EI paisaie infinito de Ia costa del Peru). In
this action, a woman wearing a large blue cloak that
completely concealed her identity drove around Lima in
a convertible making various stops throughout th e day,
while being photogra phed. In the even ing, she orrived
at the gallery with the artist who allowed her to en!er
before the public. Motionless in the mid st of th e ]
installation (into which she blended into due to the color
of her cloak), she was tran sformed by being replaced
by a mannequin. This action inscribed itself in th e
l
Eielsonian concept of extended poetryJ I and could be
seen as an allegory of beauty and death.
1990-2000
Alan Garcia 's first administration plunged Peru into a
deep economic, political, and moral crisis. In 1990,
Alberto Fujimori won the second round of presidential
elections, defeating the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. In
April 1992, he orchestrated a coup, dissolvi ng the
Congress and granting him se lf extended pow<..; :. In
::
I

Sergio Zevallos and Grupo Chaclacayo, Detritus. Chaclacayo, Peru, 1986

155
 l

Jorge Eielson. Paracas-Pvramid, Art Acade1ny, Dus~eldorf. Germany, 1974 J

156
 .•,. :,<e::!~ .
. ENRIOUECIDACOli VITAMIIIAS
·GJ.vl'll~
I fl\f't:U
fNRIGUECIOA CON VITAMINAS
Eduardo Vil:anes, Provccto Glona EvaporadJ I "Evaporated Glory" ProJect), 1994--1995, wall of Via Expressa, Lima, Peru, 1995 (Left cut cardboard detail , 2008)
September, Abimae l Guzman Reynoso, the leader of
Sendero Lu minoso, was captured. That same year, one
of the most notorious cases of civ ilian murders at the
hands of para military groups associated with the
~~atio n a l Intell igence Service (Servicio Nacional de
lnteligenc ia) came to light the disappearance of nine
students and one professor from the Universidad Enrique
Guzmc1n v Vallela Cantuta.
I
In 199L, Emilio Santisteba n, a youn g artist, carri ed out
an acti 11 en titled Unclogger (Desotorador) in the streets
of Li ma. In this action, he assumed the rol e of someone
whose job is to unplug toilets and drains. He stuck toilet
plunger s first to his chest and then to the fa~ades of
govern ment, administrati ve, and institutiona l buildings,
in a symbolic act of indicating that which was "clogged "
or inoperative in society. Thus, a new mode of individual
performance in a public space emerged, that carried an
obvious pol itical and ironic intent. I "
Between 1994 and 1995, Eduardo Villanes carried out
his first set of collaborative actions explicitly conceived
as protc,ting against human rights violations . In his one-
man skw, Evaporated Gloria (Gloria evaporada) on
October 25 , 1994, at the gallery of the School of Fine
Arts of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
(UNMSML Vi llanes decided to focus on the case of La
Cantuta. Shortly before the exhibition, the unrecognizable
remains of the disappeared had been returned to
their families in cardboard boxes used to transpmt
the "Gloria" brand of evaporated milk. Two video
performances , were sh own in the main space as port
of the installa tion.
In 1995, in a furtive intervention on one of the
walls of the Via Expresa, a highway three hundred
mete rs from the Plaza Gr·au, Villanes wrote the word
"evaporados" ("evaporated") using cutouts from the
evaporated milk cardboard boxes. He ch anged the
phrase "evaporated milk" to "evaporated people // In
another collective performance created by Vi lla nes,
people with evaporated milk boxes covered their heads
and marched towards the Federa l Congress on June 23,
1995. This was a protest against Amnesty Law ~ h
26479, which exonerated those who had violated
human rights between 1980 and 1995, and set free all
who had been previously sentenced. The law was never
debated and was crutomatically approved.
157

Elena Tejada-Hererra, Serioritd de huena pres.:ncia lnrsciJ nd,J t!lll -
p!et' IGooJ-L ooUng We man See.\ir:g E1rp!nvment I, 1usou:11 nf ..1\rt
of Lima. Peru, October 30, 1997
;ss
Finally, Villanes created another subversive performance
in which stickers with the face of Santiago Martin Rivas-
a.k.a. "Kerosene"l4 -were stuck on walls and light posts.
The artist was halted by the police, arrested and held in
custody overnight.
In 1996, Juan Javier Salazar, who had been a mem ber
of avant-garde collectives since the late 1970s and early
1980s, 15 impersonated a street vendor at the intersection
of the avenues Javier Prado and Aviaci6n, across from
the Museo de Ia Naci6n. The artist sold a stuffed toy
made from faux jaguar skin. The object was a map
of Peru and featured a tail that suggested the shape
of Chile's territory. According to the artist, it 1,vas
"an imperial map of Peru ." Humor was implicit in his
strategy of commercializing an object with hi stori c-
political undertones.
Also in 1996, Giuliano Migliori, a young artist, created
a unique work for her first solo show in which a tape
of pirated music was used in an audio perform ance_l6
Two years later, she illegally appropriated th e blo nd
name "Sublime," a chocolate manufactured by a firm
called "D'Onofrio," for the small-scale production of a
chocolate under the name "Sub-Lima." Her performance
included the delivery of orders and a sales rou te that
included locations where street vendors ha d been J
banned by the law. In both performances, Mi gl i ri
sought risky situations in which a professio nal artist J
would normally never be involved.
In 1997, Elena Tejada-H errera, a young pa inte r, i , m
to create non-conform ist performan ces in a local W ' 1 o.< t.
Her action Good-Looking Woman Seeks Em ployment J
(Senorita de buena presencia busca empleo ) was
performed on October 30, 1997 during the fi na l ~ s < :i o n
of panel presentations at the I Bienal lberoameri, '~n o J
de Lima in the Museo de Arte. Tejada-Herrea distri :- .: ed
a fli er with a text by Josue de Castro on th e co;_ _ ~" of
poverty. Later, dressed in an outfit and a hat made fro m
the "Help Wanted " section of the newspaper El
Comercio and with her pelvis exposed , she wcJiked J
across the hall and climbed onto the stage with the pa nel
presenters . Shaking her purse, she yelled , "Th ey have
dollars!" After an unsuccessful attempt to stop her and
force her off th e stage, she finished her performance by
stepping aside and urinating in front of the public. The
performa nce radica.lly exhibits an.d v.ind.icates her female
body within the settlllg of an art lnstJtullon.
In a performance entitled Memory (Recuerdo, 1998) 17
Tejada-Herrera impersonated a "disappeared" person
by placing herself inside a black plastic bag on a red
and white bull's eye painted upon the floor. She rolled
around inside the bag and turned on a radio that
alternated between the traditional waltz entitled Hate Me
(Odiame) and the names of people disappeared in the
La Can tuta incident recited over th e Peruvian national
anthem . In 1999, the artist won the Passport for an Artist
(Pa saporte para un artista) prize from the French
Embassy in Peru for her performance Chorus Girl with
Bomba and Congas in a Belly Dance (Bataclana con
bomba y su tumba en Ia danza de vientre). She plunged
into the world of popular cu lture, aware of the machismo
that defines the images of women , and enacted the role
of a bataclana, or chorus-line girl. She was accompanied
by a p rcussionist playing the "tumbadoras," or conga
dru ms, and a transvestite playing the role of a black,
fem ale street vendor. In this performance that has been
wid ely disseminated through video, Tejada-Herrera both
enact and dismantles social stereotypes.
In Don't Call Me Juanita (Yo no me llamo Juanita, 1999)
Susana Torres was inspired by the discovery of th e snow-
perser·red body of a sacrificed Inca woman in Ampato,
Peru. 'he was absurdly nicknamed "Juanita" and sent
on a '. tr of Japan . Torres exhibited herself sleeping li ke
an if .;" woman in an inner win dow of a gallery, an
!ncar. 1 .mtasy for tourists. 18 She ironically vindicated
identi!-t and gender vis-a-vis the spectacularization of the
archeological past under the dictatorship in creating th is
table , vivant that di ffered radically from Eielson 's early
experi.n ent of 1978.
That sc-:~c year, in the show Artistic Emergency (Emergencia
artistic(J), 19 Emilio Santisteban presented Crisis. The
public en tered a black room wi th a burning Peruvian
flag h'Jnging from the ceil ing . From one corner, the
viewer could see th e artist who was dressed in black
and sta nding in the middle of the room . In a solemn
gesturA he placed his hand on his heart and gazed at
the fl ag while listening to the bolero Little Faith (Poquita
Fe), which served as the national anthem. A~er the song ,
Santisteban approached one of the walls and scratched
a tally mark as a means of keeping track of the people
who entered the room . The walls of the building were
soon covered with tally marks like those that a prisoner
creates in his cell. 20 The ambiguous shifting from the
political to the personal had a disturbing effect that is
also suggested by the bolero's lyrics.
On a different note, the presence of a single viewer
was registered in Elena Tejada-Herrera 's action during
an exhibit entitled Experiential Terrain I (Terreno de
Experiencia I, 2000). The artist waited inside a small
room created in the exhibition space . She was stark naked
and held a video camera. As the visitor entered the room ,
she filmed them, and the image was projected onto a TV
screen located in another part of th e exh ibition space. This
action played with the concept of voyeurism and focused
on the feminine and the private. Tejada-Herrera
"exhibited" herself in multiples. Her gaze, while being
gazed upon, became an instrument of power and control.
The group Colectivo Sociedad Civi l (CSC) 21 emerged in
2000. esc was initially formed by artists and other
people linked to the art world, but it gradually began to
incorporate new members. The group's objective was to
open ly protest again st an untenable political situation
and to generate socia l and media pressure in order to
awaken a political/ cultural awareness among citizens .
Its most significant actions include The Burial of ONPE
(EI entierro de Ia ONPE) and Wash the Flag (Lava Ia
bandera ). Th e fi1·st action involved the wa ke and
symbolic burial of ONPE (the Nati onal Office of Electoral
Processes) on Apr il 9, 2000. Gustavo Buntinx reca ll s
that, "for twenty-eight hours, thousands of people planted
crosses , li t candles, and parodi ca lly stood as honor
guards around a coffin that was bought with monies from
a popular charity co llection ." 22 It was a swi~ reaction to
the infuriating and obviously fraudulent manipulation of
the presidential election results by the government.
Wash the Flag was a political performance that
presented an inclusive temporal structure resembling a
religiou s ritual. Anyone cou ld join in and publicly wash
the Peruvian flag in a plastic washtub provided by the
Colectivo Sociedad Civi l. CSC performed in an area
159
 powerfully delimited and transformed by a domestic
action 23 by transferring to a public space with the
highest symbolic value in Lima: the Plaza Mayor, located
next to the colonial fountain and across from the Palace
of Government, the Cathed ral , and the Municipality.
Once the fla g was washed, it was hung on a line 24 The
political nature of th e performance demanded public
participation in order to guarantee a greater impact.
Public identification with the action resulted in many
individuals-from the political and cultural scene as well
as media and common people-joining in. Each
individual's participation was prompted by his or her
own consciousness as a political subject. It was a matter
of exercising or executing a moral/civic duty of symbolic
oppos ition, which, in this context, became a foundational
assumption of citizenship.
Despite the lack of early references it cou ld be ·d h
' sat t at
at the end of the l 970s a new form of perf
. . . . orma nce
appeared for the ftrst lime, whiCh Increasingly involved
the use of streets and public squares. In the 1980
individual and collective actions emerged, centered s~
the body as medtum of cultural production. To this da
0
artists approach th e topics of i~~ntity and memory ~
order to represent soc!OI and poltttcal scenarios through
the use of role-play, icon s, emblems, and sym bols.
Autobiographical material was not used to prod uce a
body-centered praxis because in Peru, a focu s on the
individual had only just begun to be explored as a part
of political defin_ition. The sense of the coll ective only
emerged sporadtcally. The art of Peru has pr duced 0
fragmented corpus in a coun try where social life has
become de-structured.

In a texl wrillen for the Primer Coloquio Lotinoomericono de Arte No-Objetuol, held in Medellin, Colombia in 1981, the Peruvian cri tic Alfonso
Caslri llon, when alluding to th e Peru vian ca se, mention s Romero Bres t's influence: "We should highlight the visits of the Arg nti ne w l critic
Romero Brest, who during that period ( 1964-1965) gave a series of lectures tho! stimulated discussion in our milieu. The response v,as swift,
with a group of young architecture students (Miguel Malatesta, Juan Acha, Efrain Montero) organizi ng an avant-garde exhibit at lnstiiuto de
Arte Conlempor6neo (lAC) entitled MIMUY. This show was the starting point for the activities of avont·garde groups in Peru in the 19 s. See:
Alfonso Castrillon, "Reflexiones sabre arte cone plual en el Peru y sus proyecciones," Letras, Lima 48 (88-89, 1985), 2 1- 29.
2 An interesting body of research is now emerg ing around the topic of the Peruvian avanl-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, which Jtlc mpts to
locale an historical period eliminated from th e official art history in Peru. An exhibit entitled The Persistence of the Ephemeral (Lr P"' sisiencia
de lo efimero), curated by Miguel Lopez and Emilio Tarazana, revealed, for the first time, cer tain unknown features of those decade\ . In the
book Action Art in Peru, 1965- 2000: Porlroils and Sources for a Firs t Chronology (Accionismo en e/ Peru [ 1965- 2000] Roslros )' fut:: ', s para
uno primuro cronologio), Taro zona includes FPiipe Buendio's hoppening as one of the initio I nctions in hi s Rxhnu slive (olmosl cornI-I;' ·1 f"Jislry
of what was Jane in the field Howev r, in the authors' vie , this action wos rolher n festive corni v lizalion with o satiric/ iron ic it. ;" ., t1 oical
oi crio/io culture, performed in the con b ;i of on or! openinSJ . .
l Velm,:o Alvorod o imprinted o o mpletd y cliffcrf'n l ideologicol choro~le r nn his militar y 1unlo he dec ided to md, c1 rc·vvluli on fc .r th · : ' : rian
j ]
rcvoi·Jiion ti1ough !k sv·coll cl ' Third w~l )" neither comm unis m nor w pilc:li sm. It wo; nn un•J>p;,cfed miL tory ~o .pu irn •Jni ir, ,,
incrFm ino rn ililori z,lion in Latin mer: ccr, which elsewhefl" hod trq tic com,quencPI.
t of
1
4 vVorks by Teresu Burgo and l·1on ne von li\oll ndorf ore atypical of thi s period. Aulorrelralo. Estruclura -ln forme 9.6. 12, 1972 by l\Jr._,· ·, the )
first example of conceptual art in the form of a sclf.porlroil lhol focused on the female body as o sub1ecl of medical exominoli ons. fe r: : 1-- rl,
th e dancer ·;on Mol!cnclorf performed o narroliv· donee piece I the lAC in 1970, '-'·h re she made a slaiemenl oboullhe fnlsiiy ": • ; and
c•.JI!vre in rei. ti n lo moL and emphosi::ed th nee J for a cultural re!Oiution.
'il('y Lr•'!" n'l, fJur . s ·· hZ"' ' del .A!·:(•.·r:J:, OI'C Am cndo Wi!lia!11 1\\ Cfc :v:nd 1~/ Pu< SU IL 'lg·< '• v;h rlicl n_t ry J :~ : p• ;!e iii t!'( SIJ ,,;s . . : ibit.
I
{' I' mu :! lv s l rc w~ ·. l • h t k . 19RCI li 1110 lwrl unciPrgone cl r'l malic physico I cl-ong·cs o, a re. ull ')f I e inlern :JI migration that beoon i~ 1: ' '.'60s.
Tt,,: 'nt-: cr. '' .:·n ?r.:':!t. :l Lir: J ~'1 ~ ..1 u: h-1, '-'1" prc,enld by Alf nso Coslri!lcn at th e Coloqu :~ de M .clellin in 198 1 os one of th l: rep._ · '_ ,;;es f I
of non-objectual art in Peru.
7 The As sociation was fol'ncled in 198 1 and included among its m mb rs Chmo Luzo, Lucy Ang ulo, Jose Antonio Mornl ·,s, ond t\nu : 1 • 1 de
Ia Fuen e. For the 1983 exhi bition ol th gallery of th e Allionce Fron~ oi se , Angulo ond Morcdes struck a re lationship with a mentally :1: .oth er
ond son, who we re squatting on a vacant lot in the Miroflores distri ct.
J
8 In on unpublished lexl written for th e exhibit The Urban und Art: Imaginaries in Lima In Tronsformocion (Urbe & Arle. lmoginorios d! Li·n en
Tron sformaci6n, Museo de Ia Noci6n, 2006), the Peruvian critic Augusto del Valle argues that in th e work of this group, ' Organic fiuids are
allegories that refer us bock to the icons th at the members of th e group link to cultural frgures such as Argu edos and Vallejo, Saini Rosa of Lima
and the passion of Chri st. Political violence in this form of arle no-obj"lual (non-objectual orl) is ollucled lo indirectly, via the c rude n r~ d the
ob1ect, porlicdly introducing the di ssident aesthetics of Surreolisrn that wcrs ossi milcttcd by phologrophy and omorphous i1110gcs ''

160
 S rgi o Zevallos, in an interview published in 2005, notes that he was responsible for creating an iconography based on Rosa of lima, and
9
th~t it is hig hly self-referential:
"_I believe I was one of the first ones to produce on abundant iconography based on the case of Rosa de lima
san appropriation of o collective 1dea for pnvate uses: these 1nclude self-representation and the redef1n1t1on of myself. When the 1mages are
~ode publi c, they are once again alienated from me, and they become part of Rosa de lima's iconog raphy. " Protesis, Year 3 / NQ3 (lima,
December 2005)
In 1987, the Third Bienal in the city of Trujillo, north of lima, echoed the Primer Encuentro Latinoamericano de Arte No-Ob;etual in Medellin ,
10
193 1 and attempted to introduce performance art in Latin America. Roberto Valc6rcel from Bolivia and Carlos Zerpa from Venezuela were
invited, but the latter did not show up. Carlos leppe, who was not orig inally invited, did attend. The only Peruvian who created a performance
outside the context of th e Bienal was th e musician Manongo Mujica, who was inspired by Fluxist actions. He burnt and buried a violin on
Huanchoco beach .
In 0 198 1 interview with Abe lardo Oquendo, Eielson affirmed that, "the realm of poetry is infinite, even if the form, the mold, the code in which
11
it is contained is different and is conventionally labeled as music, poetry, painting, theater, ballet, etc. In my view, it's a matter of accepting that
the term 'poetry' is not exclusively verba l. " "Eielson: Remontando Ia poesia de papel," Hueso Humero N- 10 (Lima: July-October 198 1): 3-
10.Jorge Eduardo Eielson died in Milan in 2005.

12 Santiesteban declared that his work aimed at "figuratively 'unclogging' the incompetence, difficulties, and corruption which render the
relation sh ips between citizens, civil society, and the state dysfunctional, and make the institutions and organizations that are jointly responsible
for the future of the nation inoperative." His action was intended to be repeated periodically. See: <www.emi liosa ntisteban.blogspot.com >.
13 In the first video-performance, the artist, with his head covered in a cardboard box used to transport evaporated milk, butted his head repeatedly
again st o wall. The second video-performance showed the blurred image of o body inside a large plastic cylinder. During the opening of the
show, a stud ent from the School of Fine Arts began to phonetically simulate a read ing in Russian of the invitation/ catalog text. The then-curator
of contemporar y art, Carlos Leon Ximenez, began a simultaneous transla tion of the supposed Russi an text, alluding to the la Cantuta
disappearances by "evaporation. " Leon Ximenez finished his simultaneous translation and began to crawl on all fours as he insistently repeated
that maybe all wou ld have the same fate as the disappeared, but also suggested that perhaps there was a way to avoid this . This provoked a
sponta~eo us reaction in which those present cut tufts of their own hair with a pair of scissors that was passed around. The hair on the floor
accu m Iated considerably, and a few of the students from the School of Fine Arts created a human figure with the hair.
14 Rivas was the leader of the paramilitary group, Colina, that wa s directly responsible for the forced disappearances of La Cantuta as well as th e
killi ngs ! ~1 Barrios Altos. Rivas ga ined this nickname for his penchant for using kerosene to burn the remains of his victims. A video-art piece by
Villanes entitled identity Transfer, 1997, also feature s the face of Santiago Martin Rivas screened on the prostrate body of the artist.
15 Juan Jcwier Salazar was a member of th e collectives Parenthesis and E.PS. Huayco. For a detailed study of these collectives and their context, see:
Gusfuvo Buntinx, "E.P.S. Huayco. Documentos, " Fuentes para Ia Historic del Arte Peruano (Lima: Coleccion Manuel Moreyra Loredo, Vol. 3, 2005).
16 The p:ece was titled, Study of the Recuperation of DNA Molecules in Hematocites of Rat I (Ensayo de recuperacion de moilkulas de ADN en
hemalocitos de rata~ - The tape was sold at Galeria Parafernalia.
17 The acti on was held at the Faculty of letters and Human Sciences of the UNMSM.
18 She wore an outfit made of fobric silk-screened with the motif of an lncan wall tha t Juan Javier Salazar designed three years earlier.
19 Artistic Emergency (Emergencia artistica) was a self-managed show of critical art organized as an independent, yet parallel, event to the II Bienal
/beroamericana de Lima in 1999. According to the curator, Gustavo Buntinx, the project was ''conceived as an attempt to consolidate a
democrati c consensus against censorship and authoritarianism. " Gustavo Buntinx, "lava Ia bandera y el derrocamiento cultural de Fujimori y
Mo ,t. ;inos," Quehacer No. 158 (lima : Jan.- Feb 2006), 99. It is wor th noting that some of the artists who participatod in Artistic Emerg ncy
wou! -1J· on to fo rm the artist s' collaborative, Colect ivo Sociedad Civil in 2000 .
20 In h: · ~:r; one-ma n show en tit led Grand Plans for the Future (GrandE'S planes para el futuro, 1992), Santisteban created hi s first acti on by fi lling
a w 1:; \ ·ith tally marks and vid eotapin g it.
21 Accu iing to Butinx, the collec tive brought together Fernando Br yc e, Gustavo Buntinx, Claudio Coca , lui s Garcia Zapa tero, Jorge Sala zar,
Emilio Santi este ban , Susana Torres, Abel Valdivia .. Natal ia lguiiiiz and Sandro Ventura also par tic ipa ted si nificantly in the initial ph ose of
this C<iJeriment. " Gustavo Buntinx, Ibid, 98.
22 Ibid , 99
23 It is in1r•ossibie not to th ink of the popular in junction a8oinst airing une's dirty laundry. "
24 Th is r r L n \.as held every Fri doy from Ma ; 2..1 to No1ember 25, 2000.

161
 Chilean Art and Action: Subverting Order, Performing Change
Robert Neustadt
La escena de Ia avanzada:
The Neoavant-garde
of the 1970s and 1980s
Begin ning with his Happening of the Hens (Happening
de las gallinas) in 1974, artist Carlos Leppe gave a series
of performances that challenged traditional concepts and
taboos associated with the body, sexuality, and gender in
Ch ile.1 Whereas Leppe was one of the first artists in Chile
to use his body as a medium of performance, the
contemporary arts community was entering a period of
intens ive artistic experimentation in response to the
Pi nochet dictatorship . Although many artists viewed art
as the means to contest the repression of the dictatorship,
th e questions of how, and with what kind of aesthetic,
provoked a great deal of serious debate.
As artist Carlos Altamirano remembers, the enemy could
not be Pinochet, because the dictator was everyone's
enem y and he was untouchable. 2 As a consequence,
many identified trad itional art as a symbolic enemy
because they associated traditionalism with authoritarian
order. Chilean neoavant-garde artists began attacking
the concept, idea, and images of order through multiple
and va ried strategies .3
Lotty Rosenfeld's personal wo rk is an example of art that
disr pts the representation of order. In 1979, Rosenfeld
tu rrwd the transit lines of a street into crosses and
matinnatical symbols (" +") in her action A Mile of Crosses
on f'uvement (Una milia de cruces sabre el pavimen to).
Thi s gesture made reference to th e death s caused by the
regime and sim ultaneously underscored the not-so-obvious
notior that order is itself a semiotic discourse.·!
Around th e same time, Juan Castillo began mixing art with
popular graffiti . Castillo wrote the word s "pointing out
our r1 rgins" ("seiialando nuestros margenes") on wa lls in
abandoned lots throughout Santiago. Later, Castillo would
project a video of his action on a commercial shop
window, in this way conflating th e architectural and social
margins with the urban center of Santiago .s
Carlo : L1-ppe, 1919- 1979. La Estrella (The Star). Galeria CAL. Santiago. Chile. 1979
Also in 1979, Raul Zurita shocked the art world with an
action at Galeria Cal, as part of a panel presentation
on a painting by Juan Domingo Davila. Instead of
participating with a conventional academic paper,
Zurita accompanied his intervention, which was entitled
I Can't Take it Any More (No puedo mas), with a picture
of his own face, mutilated and smeared with the semen
he had collected while masturbating in front of Davila 's
painting . With this corporeal gesture, Zurita intervened
in the notion of order, interrupting , both literally and
metaphorically, the academic interpretation .
After burning and slash ing her arms and legs in 1980,
Diamela Eltit performed part of her novel-in-progress,
Lumperica, in a brothel on Maipu Street. Eltit's face was
simultaneously projected onto the exter ior wall fa cing
the street. Her performance juxtaposed literature and
prostitution , and at the same time transformed the
marginal brothel into a cultural center. By cutting herself,
Eltit physically mutilated the integrity of her body, while
symbolically shredding the ideal image of Woman
within the official (fictional) discourse of a unified Chile .
Eltit incised her body-as-text, and in this way underscored
the marginalized place and cond ition of the social body
in dictatorial Ch ile. 6
Carlos Altam iranos's 1981 art action, No Through
Traffic (Transito suspendido), transferred th e canon of
Chilean art to the streets and then washe d it away.
Altam irano took imag es of Chilean paintings from the
collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and
projected them from a roof onto a large sheet on the
sidewalk in front of the gallery Su r in Sa ntiago. During
the proj ecti ons, he wrote the definition of the word
"light" on the cloth. He then rolled th e cloth, took it to the
ga llery, and rinsed it off it.
These are just a few examples of artists who enacted
neoavant-garde art actions to perform political and
arti stic cri tique in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s.
Cultural critic Nelly Richard coined the term , "Ia escena
163

Lotty Rosenfeld, Ace/ones de arte (Art Actions). 1979 -2000, Left White House. Washington DC, US, 1981
Right: Una milia de cruces sobu7cl patimcnto (A Mile of Crosses on the Pat ement). Santiago, Chile 1979- 1980
de Ia avanzada" ("the avant-garde scene") to describe
various groups of artists who employed experimental
aesthetics to simultaneously position themselves against
consecrated art institutions and the dictatorship. :·
The avanzada did not exist as a particular group or
co ncrete movement; the term refers to a range of artistic
and political strategies. Var ious groups from the
avanzada confronted the "enemy" in their own way.
Francisco BrugnoliP. was the head of the Visual Arts
Workshop in Bellavista, where experimental artists wo uld
gather to debate their respective approaches. Ronald
Kay, Eugenio Dittborn, and Catalina Parra formed one of
these groups; Nelly Richard , Carlos Leppe, and Carlos
Altamirano comprised another; while the Collective of
Art Actions (CADA) was often at odd s with both.
164
J
Richard distinguishes between two artistic tendenci .;s of ]
the avanzada. One was CADA: "In line with th e ovc. nt-
garde, they defended aesthetic s as a means to connect
the forces of change which would attempt to Iran for m
entire social structures. " 9 The other tendency that Ri chmd
attribu tes to Leppe, Dittborn, Altamirano, Dlaz, and
Brugnoli-Errazuriz, created "fragmentary and scattered
micro-narratives" and attempted to "alter and subvert tf f
logi c of the system" following a deconstructioni st and
postmodernist paradigm. to Put in simple term s, the
di fferen t tendencies within the avanzada correspond to u
different approaches with regard to focus and sca le.
Since the political situation had produced a cl osed
country, some artists explored private or margina l
spaces wh ile others engaged society as a whole.
Eugenio Dittborn
Beginning in 1976, visual artist Eugenio Dittborn
began to incorporate found photographs of "unknown
individuals" in his work, cha llenging viewers to
con template the identities and histories of anonymous,
forgotten Others. During the 1980s, he worked with
video and art actions. His video, The History of Physics
(La historia de Ia ffsica, 1983), juxtaposes contrasting
images such as the birth of his daughter with a film
of the artist pouring 120 liters of burnt lu bricant into
th e sands of the Tarapaca Desert. In 1985, the artist
began to create collaged airmail paintings that he sent
(and continues to send) to museums and ga lleries
th roughout the world. 11
Ditiborn's collages often underscore the difficulties
of movement, travel, and cultural distance. To Return (YVR
son, 1993, for example, features an Indian named
Jemmy Button, who was bought/ stolen for a button in
1829 and taken from Tierra del Fuego to London. Aher
fifteen months of Western clothing, English lessons, and
Chr·istian "civilization" and celebrity, Button was brought
back to his homeland (aboard the same ship as Charles
Darwin, the Beagle). He later refused to return to London ,
and allegedly led a massacre of Christian missionaries in
1859 .1 2 Dittborn's use of Jemmy Button 's image embodies
th e complexity of cultural (mis)understanding. The story
bear witness to the difficulty of bridging cultural
di sta nce, even through long distance travel.
Th paintings are exhibited beside the envelopes in
w hi r:~ they were mailed . The stamped and canceled
env::lopes highlight distances-the distan ce separating
th e ortist's home/studio and the place of exhibition.
Chile's geographical location, a southern territory
seaied off by the sea and the Andes, further emphasizes
th is notion of distance in Dittborn's work. On another level,
th e dictatorship politically isolated this geographically
m01;';'1alized country. The airmail process, then , involved
a practical strategy. By sending his work through
the 1na il, Dittborn avoided th e censorship and repression
of post-coup Chile.
The process of mailing the collages affects them physically,
aesthetically, and metaphorically. Dittborn folds each
ai ' '' 'uil painting so that it can fit inside the envelope.
The visible creases that remain mark the work with
special significance. Whereas a traditional painting is
displayed on a stretched canvas that eliminates any
sign of transport, the creases on Dittborn's airmail
paintings call attention to his works' itinerate history.
There exists a paradoxical tension between the photos
incorporated in the collages and the creases that
surround them. Photographs give the appearance of
frozen history -subjects that appear resistant to change.
The signs of prior folding , on the other hand, remind us
that history and time are not static .
In April of 1998, the airmail paintings were mailed back
to Chile for an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de
Bellas Aries. Exhibiti ng the airmail paintings in Chile in
some ways completed the cycle . Like Jemmy Button , the
airmail paintings had come back "home. "
CADA, the Collective of Art Actions1 3
In 1979, Fernand o Balcells, Juan Castillo , Diamela
Eltit, Lotty Rosenfeld , and Raul Zurita founded the
Collective of Art Actions (Colectivo Acciones de Arte,
or CADA). Their goal was to intervene in the everyda y
space of Santiago with unusua l images that would
interrogate conditions that had become habitual in the
repressed environment of dictatorial Chile. CADA
performed in the space where art and politics converg e
- the social sphere- highlighting at the same tim e the
aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.
CA DA posited the entire city as a museum, soc iety as
a collaborating group of artists, and life as a work of
art in need of correction .
CADA's actions referenced urgent problems -malnutrition,
the coup, the disappeared, etc. -and attempted
to highlight these them es throu gh a new contestatory
language. If the historical avant-garde aspired to change
reality though art, CADA's neoavant-garde rhetmic
aspired to correct life as if it were a work of art. From
the Happening , CADA inherited the practice of using
the city as an open artistic medium for the creation
of (ephemeral) collective work, but CADA's art actions
attempted to channel energy from the street in a
pmductive way in order to stimulate democratic change.
165
 m y se dejaron ll&var por Ia corriente, qu~
.•. ~ de pronto Reno--, se ha roto_Ja pt.
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Eugenio Di ttborn . To Return (YVR 50 ~o). Airmail Painting No. 102, 1993

CADA's First Action: to print a completely blank page in the magazine,

To Not Starve in Art
(Para no morir de hombre en el arte)
To Not Starve in Art was carried out in several stages.
On October 3, 1979, members of CADA distributed
one hundred half-liter bags of milk to residents of La
Gran ja, a low-income neighborhood of Santiago. When
they delivered the milk, they asked that the empty bags
be returned in order to hand them over to artists who
would use these bags as material for works they would
later display at a gallery, the Galeria Centro Imagen.
Each bag of milk bore the label "l / 2 liter of milk." Since
the Popular Unity government had guaranteed a half-
liter of milk per child per day, the presence of this printed
phrase summoned the memory of Allende's government,
resurrecting memories of shattered socialist idealism .
The same day, CADA published a page in the magazine
Hoy, a mass-dist1·ibution national magazine. They wanted
with only the name "CADA" at the bottom. The director
of the magazine, named ironically Mr. Blanco (Wh ite\,
did grant them a page, but on the condition thai they
would include some con tent. The text that they ulti m rely J
published addresses CADA's action of deli veri 19
milk as wel l as their fai led attempt to "print" a b!o :k
page in Hoy:
)
imagine this page completely blank
J
imagine this page white as th e daily milk to be
consumed
J
imagine every corner of Chile deprived of the da ily
consumption of milk like blank pages to be filled 1.J
This highly poetic text works through a contextual izing
process . This layering of metaphors and rea dings
reiterates th e multilayered structure of To Not Starve in Art.

166
International Collaborations
To Not Starve in Art also had international collaborations
in Colombia and Canada. In Bogota, artist/poet Cecilia
Vicufia15 adapted the image specifically to Colombian
concern s. As Vicuna explains in the description of her
action entitled A Glass of Milk Spilled under a Blue Sky,
"pure milk" was scarce in Bogota . Some 1,920 children
were dying every year in Bogota as a result of having
ingested chemica lly-cut milk. Referencing this "dairy
crime," Vicuna filled a glass with co/bon, a milky glue.
She tied a long red string to the glass and at 12:30 in
the ahern oon she spi lled it on the pavement, by pulling
the stri ng, in front of Quinta de Simon Bolivar. On the
pavement Vicuna had written her poem Glass of Milk
(Vaso de leche) in cha lk. 16 Meanwhile, in Canada, the
artist Eugenio Tellez enacted a performance in which he
dran k a glass of milk, and read a speech in front of the
Toronto City Hall. Unfortunately, Tellez's text has been lost.
CADA's action in Chile juxtaposed the lack of milk with
the disappearance of Allende's government, in other
words, the disappeared promise of both milk and
democracy. "How not to see," CADA wrote after the
action in an unpublished manuscript, "in those bags of
milk ... , not simply a protest against shortages, against
the people's deprivation of basic material things,
agai nst Chi lean children's unmet needs, but also a
symbol of the closing off, the restrictions of a repressed
environm ent? How not to see gagged matter in those
bag s, extJ·acted from the life cycle of existence, not just
as an o cusation but also as a protest ... ?"Considering
To Not Starve in Art as a whole, the three instances form
an int . ~n ational chain of action-three extremes of the
worl d economy. A first-world country, Canada benefited
from an excess of milk. In Colombia, children were
dyin of economic corruption, poisoned milk. In Ch il e,
the pro mise of milk and state-supported public health
had disappeared with the coup.
It Is Not a Village (No es una aldea)
CADA fu rther politicized th e action with a pre-recorded
speech, It Is Not a Village (Noes una aldea), which they
delivered in front of a building of the United Nations in
Santiago, the ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin
Ame1: ~u and the Caribbean). The manifesto, reCOI·ded in
the five official languages of the United Nations (Chinese,
English, French, Russian, and Spanish), expresses a
rejection of monologism. 17 From the title and the first
sentence, "It is not a village we speak from, " the text begins
by situating itself more as a negation than a statement.
Although It Is Not a Village decries the situation in Chile, the
text still expresses hope. The last sentence describes the
"journey" of suffering as "a world to be won ." CADA
visualized the project of improving reality as a creative
process: "The place from which we speak is not a village,
it is not only that, but rather a location where the landscape,
like one's mind and life, are spaces needing revision." For
CADA, the project of improving the world is the point of
art, just as one revises a text or reshapes a sculpture.
CADA reiterated their political poetics-creative politics
is art-throughout all of their actions and manifestos.
The utopian fusion of art and life had been discussed in
Lati n American art since at least the 1960s, and also
reveals the influence of artists such as Joseph Beuys and
Wolf Vostell. 1s The following manifesto, read collectively
by ten Argentine artists in Rosario in 1968, sounded
remarkably like CADA:
We believe that art is not a peaceful activity nor is
it an ornament in anyone's bourgeois life ... We
aspire to transform each chunk of reality into an
art object that will awaken the world 's awareness,
revealing the innermost contradictions of this clas s-
based society. :.,
CADA's Second Action:
Scene Inversion (Inversion de Escena)
On Wednesday October 17, 1979, CADA staged a
parade of ten milk tru cks that drove through Santiago
and parked in front of the Museo Nacional de Bellas
Aries. The action of procuring the trucks demonstrates
CADA's mischievou sness. According to Rose nfeld , in
order to borrow the trucks they convinced a manager of
the Soprole dairy company of th e beauty of the imag e.
Though possibly confused by CADA's discussion of
contemporary art, the manager saw an opportunity for
publicity. After the event, somebody must have told the
Soprole executive that he had been tricked into
167
 collaborating in a political protest. The company tried to
purchase the video of the action, and when CADA refused
to sell it, Soprole went to the extreme of changing the logo
on their fleet of trucks .2o
In 1979, the mere act of looking at something in public
was dangerous. According to Zurita, the line of milk
trucks gave the immediate impression of an invasion of
military tanks. Upon arriving at the museum with the milk
trucks, the artists covered the fa<;:ade with an enormous
white clo th . They then declared that the true museum
was outside in the streets. To do so, CADA again
resorted to mischievous tactics. According to Rosenfeld,
they knew that the Museum Director was not there
because she had undergone surgery. They needed to
use th e flagpole in order to raise the cloth. A general
had died, so the Chilean flag was being flown at half-
mast. When they began to lower the flag, the guarqs
confronted the artists . Th e members of CADA explained
that they had the director's permission, that it was an
artistic action honoring the Museum's hundred years in
existence. The security guards allowed them to proceed!
Nelly Richard has interpreted the intervention of the cloth
as an action consisting of three elements:
When CADA. .. covers the fa<;:ade of the Museum ...
they virtual ly block the entrance, they exercise a
double act of censoring the institutional aspect of
art. They censor the monument, first as a Museum
(an allegory of the canonizing tradition of the art
of the past) and , second ly, as a Chilean museum (a
symbol of cultural officialdom). But they do this
while simultaneously reclaiming the street as "the
true Museum " in which the daily paths of the city
dwellers become-through this inverted optic-the
new work of art to be viewed. ~
The action presents one of CADA's central ideas: the
street is a museum. "
The action Scene Inversion encouraged the public gaze
to refocus. By this time the dictatorship had been in
power for over six years and the situation had become
habitual, almost invisible. Seen as a whole, CADA's
action organized reality in what they ca lled a "soc ial
168
sculpture": an "art action that attempts to organi ze,
through intervention, the time and space we live in , as
a way, first, of making it more visible, and then, more
livable."23 CADA does not mention the reference, but
Joseph Beuys had coined the term "social sculpture."24
CADA gave this a specific meaning by employing it in
the context of the Pinochet dictatorship. Moreover,
CADA also took advantage of the Spanish transl ation,
"esculturo social" to evoke their celebration of popular
culture in the streets, "es culturo" (it is culture) .25
Oh South America! (;Ay Sudamerica!)
On July 12, 1981, CADA dropped 400,000 fl iers over
Santiago using six small-engine planes. In order to
"read" this action, there are at least three different levels
one must take into account: the flier-text, the visua l
component, and the action's discursive perform ance.
On the most conventional level, one can read th e text of
the fliers themselves 2A The main ideas reiterate con cepts
that CADA had already expressed in their fi rst two
actions. By removing art from its traditional context and
taking it outdoors, CADA intended to fuse art wi th life .
"WE ARE ARTISTS" they insist twice on the fli er, "BUT
EACH INDIVIDUAL WHO WORKS FOR THE EXPANSION
OF THE SPACE OF HIS OR HER LIFE (EVEN IF MENTAL)
IS AN ARTIST. " Here the members of CADA describe
themselves while, at the same time, they argue that only
art that attempts to improve life is valid: "THE WOP.K OF
EXPANDING THE CONDITIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE IS
THE ONLY VALID STAGING OF ART/THE ONLY EXHI.IT/
THE ONLY WORK OF ART THAT LIVES. "
A reading of Oh South America! also entails an analysis
of the action's visual imagery. Six airplanes flyi ng over
Santiago in military formation created an initia l image
of a military raid that changed once the bundles of fl iers
opened. Thousands of leaflets, scattering ac ross th'3 sky,
would compete for the attention of citizens. Oh )outh
America! converted th e airplanes (and fliers) into igns
and in so doing inscribed "concrete poetry" in th e Jy of
dictatorial Ch ile .27
Once again, the context is extremely impo rtant. In
1980, th e anti-dictatmship struggle in Chile huJ l>t:8U n
 '\..
/
.. / .

CADAit. ,IPctivo Arciones de Art~ I Art Artirm Collect;ve), iA), Sudamerica' (Ohl South America), Santiago. Chile, Jul•, 12. 1981

169
 CAD IColectivo Acciones de Arte /Art Actions Collective). NO +, Santiago, Chile. Late 1983

170
wi th generalized protests that culminated in 1983.
Writers and other public figures participated in these
actions, trying to find channels of expression, which
would not trigger immediate reprisals by the military.
Th ough more theoretically complex, CADA was one of
many groups that mobilized art and culture to help
open a democratic space .
For this extraordinary event, CADA obtained permission
from the authorities to criticize authoritarianism .2s
Aesthetically, the action developed a new style of protest.
Whereas pamphlet art had traditionally been a strategy
used by the orthodox left, CADA always reiected
un ivocal discourse. CADA intervened in the political
aerospace of the dictatorship combining poetic texts with
striking images. Thus, CADA created a visual/poetic
la nguage that challenged the citizens of Santiago to
question the normality of life under dictatorship.
No + (No mas, or No More)
With out exception, the members of CADA deem No +
to be their most significant action. Between the end of
1983 and 1984, members of CADA (along with many
collaborators) went out at night to write No + on walls
th roughout Santiago. Shortly afterwards, others began
to com plete the phrase with images, words, or phrases.
Declarations such as "No+ dictatorship," "No+ torture,"
"No + weapons," "No + disappeared," and "No +
1
deat began to appear on walls, forming a counter-
( Artists Who Left Chile:
dictatorial graffiti web throughout the city.
No + was a collective action in the widest sense. Not
only did many artists take part, but the public also
partic ipated . For CADA, part of the success of this work
was the fact that their authorship would disappear
altogeth er. From their first action, they pursued the idea
of anonymous creation by only signing the publication in
Hoy ··1ith their collective name, CADA. In No +, they
refrai ned from signing and they stopped short of
com pleting the graffiti declarations. The notion of
authoria l subiect disappeared and the work came to
belong to the community, the anti-dictatorship movement.
This action too was disseminated internationally.
CADA sen t a "Cal l to Artists" inviting international
participation. In Holland, Juan Castillo organized a
European version of No + that coincided with the
occupation of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.29 In
Washington D.C., the Inti Gallery presented NO+: An
Action Performance Exhibit on June 11, 1984.3o
Despite international support, the most significant
impulse came from within Chile. The members of CADA
were surprised to see how what began as their work
quickly acquired a life of its own in the pro-democracy
movement. The No + slogan led all of the marches
against the dictatorship. Milan lvelic, Director of the
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, notes the importance
of the action: "CADA's No +, which referred to a
specific political struggle, No more Pinochet ... found
an extension in the ... 'No' [vote] of the Plebiscite [on
Pinochet's rule], which soon after led to the restoration of
democratic elections in the country".31 In 1990, the No+
slogan even appeared on the scoreboard of the National
Stadium in the public ceremony that inaugurated the
democratically elected government of Patricio Aylwin.
Over a period of several years, CADA disbanded as a
collective, and its members now pursue individual
interests in art, culture, and literature. 32 Today, CADA
resonates invisibly within the scene of Chilean cultural
politics that they so visibly changed .
Juan Downey and Alfredo Jaar
Juan Downey
Juan Downey left Chile in 1965, wel l before the
dictatorship that shapes the work of many contemporary
Chilean artists. Up until the coup of 1973, much of his
work focused on the nature and philosophy of art in and
of itself in a way that displayed a unique sense of humor.
Downey inscribed a matchbook in the style of a wedding
souvenir, for example, and this became a piece of art
entitled, A Fire Sculpture (1969) . On the front of another
matchbook Downey printed what might be considered
his motto: "The art of invisible energy is in visible energy
is in." For Downey, life corresponded to invisible energy.
Art, on the other hand, represented the process of
making energy visible.
171
 Downey worked with the emerging technologies of his
time-video, audio, light projection, biofeedback, and
radio waves . He invented electronic machines to
underscore the interrelationships between art, energy,
thought, and the human condition. He facilitated
happenings and performances, often highlighting the
concept of "invisib le energy" as th e vital force that
moves our bodies and minds .33 For the Downey of
"happenings," art was not something to be bought and
sold, but rather a way to experience life in the moment
and in a collective social group. 34
Downey's short life ( 1940 -1993 ) inc luded an
extraordinary diversity of experiences. He painted in
Paris, enacted happenings in the U.S. during the 1960s,
and spent one year with his family living with several
tribes including the Yanomami Indian s of the Amazon
(meditating, drawing, and filming video) from 1976 to
1977. This is not to say that Downey was not concerned
about the political situation in Chile . Following the
military coup in 1973, he crea ted videos and
insta llations that took aim at the dictatorship. Since he
was living in the United States, Downey had no need to
veil his criticism of the dictatorship in complex hidden
codes, as did artists who remained in Chile. Along these
lines, Downey created T-shirts with the logo, "Chile si
Junta no," and placed a not-so-subtle red stain in the
center symbolizing blood 3s The shirts were given to
protesters in front of ITT (International Telephone and
Telegraph) headquarte:·s on September 11, 197 4.
Downey's video performance Chilean Flag, 197 4 was
broadcast on cable television on Manhattan's Channel
'D. ':;,, In Chilean Flag, Downey parodies the dictatorship
and its use of the national flag as a discourse by offering
a new interpretation of the flag's symbolic colors
This is the Ch ilean flag. Since this is a black and
white television, I should explain the meaning of
its colors to you .
By explain ing th e colors on a black and white television,
Downey highlights the absurdity of any nation's
manipulation of symbolism. According to officia l Chilean
discourse, the red on th e flag represents the blood spilled
in th e struggle fm independence, the blue rep:·esents
172
the clear Chilean sky, and whi te evokes the snow
of the Andes . Downey's version turns such nationalism
on its head :
The red represents the blood of the heroes; the blue
represents water, the water that is needed to wash
the spilled blood; the star represents the interminable
process of bleeding and washing; finally, the white
symbolizes the total annihilation of the blood and
water. Th e future Chilean flag may be completely
white, or completely blue, or, totally red Y
There is no narrative of victory here but rather interminable
suffering. For Downey, the flag is more about conflict than
victory, so much so that even the colors are in conflict with
one another. Many of Downey's political installations
engage with the media and take th em to task for not
communica ting the truth about what was occurring in
dictatorial Chile. In his installation Corner, 1985, Downey
displayed pro-Pinochet newspaper clippings from Chi le's
newspaper, El Mercurio, and contrasted these with critical
accusations published in the Cuban paper, Granma. In
his video Motherland, 1987, Downey juxtaposed pro-
Pinochet television from Chile with scenes of protests
aga inst the dictatorship. About Cages, 1987, is a complex
installation of birds in a cage with a video monitor
(displaying a video of a bird in a cage). Josephine Watson
writes that the monitor itself represents a cage, and that
television has come to represent a "mental oppressor." J8
Alfredo Jaar, Antes de partir (Before Leaving)
In 1981 the artist Alfredo Jaar placed one thousan ds: , , 11
Chilean flags in a continuous line that stretched from tne
mountains to the sea. Jaar photographed the fl ogs,
individually and in series, and presented them as an
installation/performance. P, great deal of mean ing can
be obtained from the title, Chile 1981, Before Leaving
(Antes de partir). Since this was Jaar's last performance
before migrating to New York, th e work expresses th e
artist's personal farewell to Chile. However, a num ber of
other readings emerge when viewing the flag s fro m
different historical vantage points.
Before Leaving is grounded in the history and political
context of Chile. Du:·ing the fi:st yems of the 197CJ\
 '' Pl..\ TO -p-r~· ~­
_t:U--~~u. ::
\(J\\":

v .. lP.'. ,.' PIato NOl l'. 1972

Juan Qn.

173
 Chile was conflicted politically between those who
supported the elected socialist government, Unidad
popular, and those who vehemently opposed the Left.
Following the coup of September 11, 1973, the divide
intensified between the military dictatorship, its
supporters and its victims.39 Viewed in this context,
Before Leaving becomes a visual symbol of Chile's
political duality by means of a line that divides the land.
The title itself alludes to this division: whereas partir
means "to leave," the verb can also signify "to divide"
or "split." Jaar' s performance constitutes a border that
linearly represents the divided state of Chile via the
heavily charged symbolism of the national flag.
The sequence of photographs conveys at least two
significant movements: A horizontal movement, marching
towards the ocean, and a vertical movement of rising
ocean water that consumes and finally covers the flags.
The context of the military dictatorship contributes further
levels of meaning to these movements . The movement to
the sea not only refers to the personal departure of the
artist who left Chile, but beyond this to the multitude of
Chileans who crossed the sea and fled the country in
exile . The movement within the water also recalls the
dictatorship. Just as the flags sink into the sea, the work
metaphorically suggests that the nation of Chile is
sinking in authoritarian repression. The performance
also anthropomorphizes these national symbols. One
cannot see these flags disappear beneath the water
without thinking of the "disappeared" (los desaparecidos)
who were killed by the military regime and disposed of
clandestinely (some of them buried alive in the sea).
Jaar's performance might be said to engage Derrida 's
notion of the trace with the signs of the disappeared.
During the Pinochet regime, the dictatorship employed the
Chilean national flag to divide Chile into two opposing
groups, "chi/enos" versus "terrorists." The repression went
hand in hand with the manipulation of national symbols.
In fact, symbols usually precede the imposition of abusive
power and terror. In a passage on "cruelty" Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari write, "the first signs are the
territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies."4o Whereas
the dictatorship imposed the flag as a nationalistic
symbol, Jaar's performance exposes the complex weave
of the flag-as-discourse. In Chile 1981, Before Leaving,
174
the flag no longer represents a monological symbol of
the nation (a linear relationship implying a direct link
between sign and signified), but rather a frayed social
fabric of individuals, including the artist, who no longer
pertain to a unified community. The dictatorship planted
the national flag-as-symbol to represent its version of
Chilean identity. Jaar's performance symbolically splits
the symbol (Ia parte, to employ again the verb partir)
and thus separates and divides the false sign of national
unity into a multiplicity of water-logged strands .
Jaar again employed the image of a flag, the U.S. flag,
in his best-known intervention, A Logo for America, 1987.
By illuminating "This is not America's flag" across the
image of the United States flag on an enormous electronic
billboard in Times Square, New York, Jaar simultaneously
underscored the political hegemony of the United States
and the associated Gramscian hegemony that allows for
millions to identify na·l·vely one country and its fl ag as
"America."4J The U.S. was deeply complicit with the coup
of September 11, 1973,42 the event that inspired Jaar's
line of Chilean flags. Subsequently, September 11 , 200 1,
resulted in an amazing proliferation of "American" flags
throughout the United States. This obsession with th e U.S.
flag continues to this day.4J
Opus 1981, Andante desesperato
Jaar's Opus 1981, Andante desesperato was inspired by
an image taken in Nicaragua in 1979 by photog1·opher
J
Susan Meiselas. This striking photograph captu re:. two
Sandinista soldiers with machine guns taki n ~1 crver
beneath a sandbag barricade. Behind these men, WR ee
another Sandinista who stands playing clarinet. The
photograph inspired Jaar to video himself playing clarinet
J
and to include this film in a museum installation. The prize-
winning installation was displayed in the Notional
Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile in 198 ! . The
exhibit included a television monitor showing t e fiim of
Jaar blowing sounds on clarinet, the original videotape
J
mounted on the wall, and Susan Meiselas's ph ogroph.
Scattered throughout the installation were sand bags and
large representations of musical notes made from metal.
To interpret Jaar's performance it is helpful first to
contemplate Meiselas's photograph. What is t' .. ~ tory
behind this unusual photograph token near the triumph
of the Sandinisto revolution in July, 1979? In the middle
of a skirmish one soldier stands defiantly and ploys
cl ari net. We cannot hear what he ploys, we con only
imag ine: A Sondinisto fight song to rally the troops? A
cla ssical Opus to bring calm to chaos? Circus music to
mock the Contra enemies? Meiselos's photograph poses
an open musical question in on enigmatic, almost
surreal, juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous images.
In an analysis of Joar's use of the image, the exact
musical melody proves irrelevant. The soldier with a
clarinet could be said to represent" art" standing up and
bei ng heard in the arena of war and politics . This
reading seems less stretched when we remember that the
term avant-garde derives from the vocabulary of war. In
war, the avant-garde leads the way, the vanguard
explores the front and/or initiates the attack on the
enemy. Of course, the historical ovont-garde refers to on
array of art movements that employed experimental
techniques during the time between World Wars I and
II, in multiple efforts to realign our aesthetic expectations
in ways that would force changes in our conceptions of
art and life. Neoovont-garde artists have subsequently
employed methods reminiscent of the historical avont-
garde in different contexts from the 1960's to the present,
in various attempts to employ art as a political weapon.
As mentioned earlier, during the 1980's, groups of
neoava nt-garde artists fiercely debated how to use
expe !mental art as a political arm with which to oppose
authoritarianism. The young Alfredo Jaar would certainly
have \::en following these debates within the highly
chart~ad Chilean art world of the avanzada.
Jaor's Opus re-fromes Meiselos's photograph and in this
way presents an allegory for the power of art to
chall enge injustice through the provocation of thought.
For th:s performance Jaar filmed his head and torso as
he "pioyed" a clarinet. Joar did not actually know how
to ploy the instrument. In the video, he blows furiously
into th e mouthpiece (which he holds backwards) and
prod uces honking, dissonant, a-musical squeaks until he
finally collapses from exhaustion and disappears from
the fram e. His action created an experimental opus
through vvhich to express the suffocating desperation of
living i1 1 dictatorial Chile.
Perhaps the key to Opus 1981 is the relationship
between Meiselos's photograph and the performance
itself. Jaor performed what he saw in the photograph,
on allegory for the power of art. Though Jaor left
Chile the some year, 1981, he has continued to
employ thought-provoking art installations and public
interventions to engage with politics and injustice
around the globe. Throughout his career Joor has
continually criticized injustice-dictatorship, poverty,
homelessness, AIDS, the U.S.-Mexico border, the moss
media, and genocide to nome a few-and he has
articulated these critiques through experimental art.
Opus 1981, Andante desesperato, con be seen as a
seminal performance in the formation of Joor's identity
as artist/activist. Much like the Sondinista with his
clarinet, Alfredo Jaor stands defiantly and performs art
to expose and oppose injustice.
Arte -:f. Vida: Actions by
Contemporary Chilean Artists
Alfredo Jaor prefaces his book, The Fire this Time: Public
Interventions 1979-2005, with a quote by James
Baldwin: "Life is more important than art, that's what
makes art important." For Joor, art is the mechanism
through which we make sense of life and critique
political injustice. A similar perspective unites the
Chilean artists of the avonzada, Eugenio Dittborn's
airmail paintings, CADA's art actions, and the late Juan
Downey's installations and videos.
Art is not life-el arte :t: Ia vida-yet art and life ore
inextricably bound in Chilean art actions. For Downey,
art rendered the invisible energy of life visible. For
CADA, art represented life that had been corrected
("EI arte es Ia vida corregido"), 44 while art actions
aspired to transform life into visible/livable social
sculptures. For Dittborn, art reveals the folds and creases
that repressive society, history, and power try to smooth
out and hide. Art is not life, but it represents, through its
action, the potential to understand, expose, and correct
inequities and injustice. Art provides us with the means
through which to perform and improve the conditions
and political realities of life .
175
 1
)

lfru.lo Ja<H. Opus !981 1 Andante Desusperato. Santiago. Chile. 1981 (Top photo from installation1J·1\us;m ~.dPi\ las:
1
Riuht'.'iden stiils IJ, Allrerlo Jaar)

1
J

J
176
177
 See Nelly Richard, "The Rhetoric of the Body," Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 (Melbourne: Art & Text, 1986) for analysis f
the use of th e body in works by Leppe, Eltit, Neustandt, and Raul Zurita. See also the book conceptua lized collaboratively between Nell
Richard and Carlos Leppe, Nelly Richard, Cuerpo Correccional (Santiago: V.I.S.U.A.L., 1980). y
2 Robert Neustadt, CADA dia : La creacion de un arte social (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2001), 21 . The section on the Collective of Art
Actions was extracted from my book, Coda dia and translated to English by Odile Cisneros. The English version was then corrected, re-edited
and updated by the author.
3 See the chapter, "La transgresi6n de los limites" in Gaspar Galaz and Milan lvelic, Chile, arte actual (Valparaiso: Ediciones Universitarias de
Valparaiso, Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, 1992) for a history of Ch ilean art of this period.
4 Rosenfeld has continued to develop this work, with variations, in different parts of the world. In 1982, she converted transit signs into crosses
in the street in front of the U.S. White House. That same year, she installed video monitors broadcasting her work in Chile's stock exchange.
Rosenfeld performed this intervention again recently at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany in 2007. For commentary on this work (written by
members and collaborators of CADA), see Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milia de cruces sabre el pavimento, with texts by Diamela Eltit and Eugen ia
Brito (Santiago: Ediciones CADA, 1980), and Desacato: Sabre Ia obra de Lotty Rosenfeld, with texts by Eugenia Brito, Diamela Eltit, G. Munoz
Nelly Richard, and Raul Zurita (Santiago: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1986). See also Galaz and lvelic, Chile, arte actual, 229-231. '
5 Galaz and lvelic, Ibid., 215-216.
6 For an analysis of Eltit's performance see Robert Neustadt's (Con)Fusing Signs and Postmodern Positions: Spanish American Performance
Experimental Writing and the Critique of Political Confusion (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 25-62 . See also Laura Garda-Moren~
"Violent (Re-) Inscriptions: Writing and Performance in Diamela Eltit's Lumperica," Latin American Literary Review 35.69 (2007), 120- 136.
7 See the introduction to Richard, Margins and Institutions, 119-123. For a sampling of publications with analysis and interviews on the web
see Paula Honorato and Luis Munoz, "Recomposici6n de escena, 1975-1981 : 8 publicaciones de los aries visuales en Ch ile :,
<http://www.textosdearte.cl/recomposicion/index.htmb '
8 Francisco Brugnoli was considered an important artist in Chile since 1965, when he created a series of "monos pegoteados" ("glued-on
overalls"), collage/paintings that always included real overalls as their ma in element. After the coup, Brugnoli was fired from his post as art
professor at the Universidad de Chile. During the democratic transition, Brugnoli returned to the University, becoming Vice Dean of the Arts
Faculty. Since 1998, Brugnoli has been director of the Museo de Arte Contempor6neo in Santiago.
9 Nelly Richard, La insubordinacion de los signos: Cambia politico, transformaciones culturales y poeticas de Ia crisis (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto
Propio, 1994), 47.
10 Ibid., 46-47.
11 On Dittborn's work, see Gal6z and lvelic; Richard, Margins and Institutions; and Ernesto Soul, Aries Visuales 20 anos 1970-1990 (Santiago Ministerio
de Educaci6n, 1991 ). See also Dan Cameron, "Eugenio Dittborn: Return to Sender-Visual Artist," Artforum International, Vol. 31 (March, 1993).
12 I acquired the information regarding Jemmy Button 's life history from the (possibly unreliable) Wikipedia. Of course, all we have of Button are
images, visual and narrative testimonies, that were constructed by British people involved in the experiment of "civilizing" him, fol lowed by
subsequent re-appropriations of these images by a series of writers, ultimately Dittborn.
13 For more complete description and analysis of CADA actions (including interviews with the artists, photographs and historical documents), see
Neustadt, CADA dia.
14 Ibid , 137.
15 Cecilia Vicuna has experimented with non-traditional art and politics since the 1960s in Chile. In 1967, Vicuna founded "Tribu No," a ~ ro up
tha t disseminated manifestos and did public interventi ons. In 197 1, she exhibited her work/ installation Autumn (Olano) at the Museo e Bellas
Aries in Santiago. For th is work (of great historical importance in Chilean art), Vicuna filled the main room with one meter of dead lea ves. She
has worked with painting and has made films, but is better known for her visual poems built with debris, branches, string, yarn, and oth. r r )tmd
objects. After the coup, Vicuna went into exile in London (1973) and later Bogota (1977). In London she founded a group of art actids ·sho
worked for democracy. In Colombia, she built sets for the Candelaria Theater and the musical group Ouilapayun. Since 1980, VicuG J has
resided in New York. She has authored multiple books of poetry. She has also shown her installations at the Museum of Modern Art an d tLe New
Museum in New York. On November 17, 2006 Vicuna performed an art action in front of the Chilean Presidential palace, La Moneda . She
also had a controversial installation, Ouipu menstrual, in the Centro Cultural Pa lacio Ia Moneda (which is underneath the presidential . uloce).
16 For a more detailed description of Vicuna's action and her poem, see Neustadt, CADA dia, 29-30 and 18 1 (Vicuna's description). A color
picture of the action appears on th e cover of Griselda Pollock, ed , Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (New
York: Routledge, 1996). See black and white photos in Cecilia Vicuna, The Precarious/ OUIPOem: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuna, M.
Catherine de Zegher, ed , Esther Allen , trans. (Kortrqk, Belgium : Wesleyan and Kanaal Art Foundation, 1997)
17 Neustadt, CADA dia, 128.
18 Wolf Vostell showed his work in Chile in Galeria Epoca in 1977, two years before CADA's first action. In 1981, Eltit and Rosenfeld travel ed
around Europe (invited by the lnteramerican Foundation with the support of the Ford Foundation). During th is trip, they spent two days in Vostell's J
home, talking, among other th ing s, about CADA's first actions.
19 Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, "Vangua rdia y revoluci6n: Acciones y definiciones par una 'Nueva Estetica' Argentina, 1968 ," La
abolicion del arte. Alberto Dallal, ed. (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, 1998), 603
20 Neustadt, CADA dia, 50.
21 Nelly Richard, La insubordinacion de los signos, 41.

178
 22 There is at least one precedent of a work that intervened the la~ade of the Museo de Bellas Aries, the installation Cuerpos blandos(Solt Bodies) by
Juan Pablo Langlois (Vicuna) in 1969. Langlois filled plastic bags with newspapers building a 200-meter sleeve that traveled across the Museum, went
out a window and ended up tied to a tree in front of the building. Years later, in 1997, Gonzalo Diaz intervened the la~ade with a neon sign reading ,
"Unidos en Ia gloria y Ia muerte." For a description of Langlois's and Diaz's works, with comparison to CADA, see Neustadt, CADA dia, 1B, 32 .
23 Neustadt, CADA dia, 24.
24 "How we mold and shape the world in which we live, " Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 6.
25 A recent exhibition of contemporary Mexican art at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art uses Beuys's concept as a conceptual umbrella.
See Julie Rodrigues Widhalm, "Reshaping the World Through Social Sculpture," Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art From Mexico City
(Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2007), 14-29.
26 See flie r from Ay Sudamerica! (with complete text), reproduced in Neustadt, CADA dia, 150.
27 jAy Sudamerica! took place two years before Zurita wrote his poem in smoke across the New York sky. The two gestures are related yet different.
Zuri ta wrote lines of verse across the sky of New York using smoke from advertising planes.
28 See letters from CADA requesting permission as well as corresponding documents from the military authorities in Neustadt, CADA dia, 146-149.

l 29 See Juan Castillo's description of this even t in Neustadt, CADA dia, 60-61.
30 Participants in No + in Washington D.C. included (amongst others): Ariel Dorfman, Marcelo Montecino, Rick Reinhard, Lucho Salvatierra,
Raul Oieda, Leslie Kuter, Eduardo Ramirez, Jorge L. Somarriba, Horacia Quintani lla, Gabriela Frings, Helga Thompson, Yusol Ghani ,
Nancy Garuba, Jim Spi llane, Maria Riquelme, Aida Rurela, Oliva Cadaval, Gabrielle Edgcomb, Carlos Airen, and Enrique Aviles.
31 ~~eustadt, CADA dia, 175. Video interview with Lotty Rosenfeld.
32 Diamela Eltit is considered by many to be one of the most important contemporary novelists in Latin America. Raul Zurita received the National
Prize lor Literature lor his poetry in 2000. Juan Castillo and Lotty Rosenfeld continue to work in video, installations, and art actions. Fernando
Balcells publishes (occasionally) on art and culture.
33 For example, Invisible Energy Dictates a Dance Concert (1969 and 1970).
3,l For descriptions and photographs of Downey's happenings, performances, installations, drawi ngs, and videos, see the beautifully illustrated
catalogue/book, Josephine Watson, Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond these Walls (Valencia: IVAM, 1998).
35 Earlier, in 1969, Downey had created another series ofT-shirts with the logo, "Boycott Grapes" and the symbol of the United Farm Workers. '
He gave the shirts to bag boys at supermarkets who were to wear the shirts and refuse to carry groceries containing grapes. Downey also sold
"Boycott Grapes" T-shirts (signed and numbered) and donated the money to cesar Chavez.
36 With the participation of Marilys Belt de Downey, Titi Do Great, Juanli Lamadrid, Rolando Peiia, isabel Morrison, Maruia Do Acosta-G6mez,
Alexis del Logo, Steve Smith, and Michael Krugman.
37 Author's translation.
38 Juan Downey, 228.
39 This polarization continues to a certain point today, although the awareness of the dictatorship's violent excesses coupled with the revelations
of the fiscal corruption of the Pinochet family (the Riggs Bank scandal) have diminished open support of the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship.
These developments are forcing the construction of a different version of the political Right in Chile .
4C Gil les Deleuze and Felix Guottari, Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 145.
4' A Logo for America includes a series of related images. Prior to the U.S flag, th e sign displayed the map of the United States wi th the words,
This is not America." This linguistic appropriation-calling the United States "America "- goes hand in hand with the ideology that one country
can and should control the political and economic decisions of an entire continent. Many people would never question that the United States is
in fact "America." To use the vocabulary of Gramsci, the notion that the Un ited States is America has won hegemony and is accepted as if it
were "common sense ." Joar is clearly familiar with the writings of Gram sci, he in fact created a number of recent works that are based explicitly
on Gromsci. See photographs and discussion of Joar's installations Searching far Gromsci, 2004 and the Infinite Cell, 2004 in the book, Jaor
SCL 2006(Barcelono Actor, 2006).
42 The de-classification of CIA documents during the Clinton presidency put to rest any doubt regarding the deep-seated complicity of the U.S.
government in the coup against Allende. For a detailed explanation of the United States' role in de-stabilizing the Allende governm ent and
fomenting the coup (including many de-classi fied documents), see Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File. A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and
r ccountability (New York: New Press, 2003).

43 In Arizona-the 49th state in the Union in per-pupil funding of K- 12 public education-a law now mandates that on "American flag" (not less
t' on two feet by three feet and made in "America ") must be displayed in every public classroom at the elementary, middle, high school, and
university levels. Though it began with September 11, this new surge of flag waving takes momentum from the issue known in the press as illegal
;rn migration. Second only to the "War on Terrorism" (and associated with this War on many levels), the immigration of illegal aliens to "American
soil" is often cited as this country's biggest problem. Of course the issue is global. Impoverished Nicaraguans seek work in Costa Rica, North
Africans in Spain and France, Turks in Germany to give on ly a few examples. In each developed country the perceived socioeconomic strain
of immigration leads some to describe immigration as a threat to notional identity. In Chile, as well, Bolivian and Peruvian migrants allegedly
pose a threat to Chilean national identity.
4L\ 'leustadt, CADA dio, 119.

179
 A Cuban Fight Against the Demons (of Oblivion)
Elvis Fuentes
In 1988, in the context of an exhibition on the theme of
(mi s)information in arl,l Tania Bruguera remade Blood
Sign (197 4), one of Ana Mendieta's first performances.
As Bruguera revealed in an interview, it was an attempt
to bring her back to Cuba , that is, to recover her for
the memory of Cuban art following her tragic death a
year earl ier. Later, using the documentation in the
catalog of Mendieta 's retrospective at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, New York, as a guide, Bruguera
remade many works, which she eventually destroyed .2
This symbolic gesture responded to a fundamental
problem that remains unresolved: the incomplete vision
provided by the official discourse on Cuban art. Even in
the case of Ana Mendieta, an artist who not on ly vis ited
Cuba more than once, but who also created wo rk s
there, showed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Aries,
Havana, and became an important catalyst for the artists
of the 1980 generation; historiography does not
recognize the importance of her work in the tradition of
Cuban art on the island. 3 The situation is even worse
when it comes to artists who never visited Cuba ,
Ana fv1end i ~ t a , Untitled (Biood Sign 112 I Bod}' Tracks ).lowa , lJ S, 1974
Tania Bruguero, Tho Bw,ien of Guilt. Hav~na Bienn~ l e . Havana. Cuba. 1997- 1qgg
180
regardless of their positions vis-a-vis Fidel Castro's
dictatorship.4 They are simply ignored.
This insular conception of Cuban art has been uncritically .1
"cloned" by many academics in the United States and
Europe. In that way, they too have sentenced any artist
who "deserted" Havana. s It may be th at those scholars
justify their approach on the basis of territoriality or
historical context (focusing , for instance, on artists tha t
were born and raised under the new conditions imposed
by real socialism) , but that would at least reveal a
reactionary vision of identity, culture and art itself Instead
of taking advantage of their privileged position to serve
as channels of commu nication between the outs ide and
the inside, they have engaged in a lopsided treatm ent
that the following two comparisons can help make cl ear.
I
KMAN is a Mi ami-based artist who has produced an )
essentially performative oeuvre dealing with topics such
as terror and soc ial paranoia from the mid-1970s
onwards. In a period marked by plane kidnappings and
Islamic and Marxist militant terrorism, KMAN got into
J

KMAN, Aura Jet Scale Model Flight and Paper Bombing Over Dance Floor, Fire and Ice Club, Miami, FL. US, 1984
the habit of appearing in public places wearing masks
and other mil itary gea r that he created . Sometimes he
armored his bicycle . Riding it or going on foot, he made
"forays" into aerial, terrestrial, and maritime territories.
He often invaded the private space of other artists
with planes or rockets that wou ld end up bombing a
place or crashing against a wall. He became a regular
fi xture at gallery openings and events such as the
"assa ult" on the Miami Metro Rail organized by NADA
group in 1985. He used tactics such as infiltration, as in
the action he performed at a popular nightclub, Fire and
Ice (1984), in which KMAN impersonated a DJ. Once
inside the DJ booth, he scattered hundreds of bombs
printed on paper among the crowd . KMAN's actions did
182
•I
1
not lack controversy. Th e mere fact of appeari nq :n
costume at public events, such as parades, outside of tLe J
regular Halloween season and not adequately identifying
himself raised suspicion. On several occasions, th e police
asked him and even forced him to remove his outfits."
In its own way, the group Arte Calle, made up of art
students, also used guerrilla tactics. Its performances
were surprise actions at mostly art even ts. In one of their
better-known works, We Don 't Want to Be Intoxicated
(No queremos intoxicarnos, 1988) , its members
interrupted a panel on the subject of "The Concept of
Art, " which was taking place at the UNEAC (N ational
Union of Writer·s and Artists of Cuba). They sh owed up
wearing T-sh irts bearing the name of the group and wore
as masks . They also carried signs that paraphrased
;evoluti onary slogans to add art related content: "Art or
Death . We will prevail!" and "Dear Critics, Be informed
that we are not at all afraid of you." 7
Although these two proposals are aesthetically similar,
U.S. scholarship has ignored KMAN's work and , on the
contra ry, has exhaustively analyzed Arte Calle's actions .
This is also the case with actions inspired by similar
them es created by NADA group in Miami and
Provisional group and Maldito Menendez in Havana .
NADA emerged in 1984 from a conversation between
Adal berto Delgado and Fred Snitzer. There were six
foundi ng members, three of them Cuban: Delgado,
Fernando Garcia , and Jose Gonzalez Boada. Delgado
recalls that in 1985 they organized an action in response
to an exh ibit by New York artists at the Lowe Art Museum
in Mia-mi. Just in front of the building on one of the lawns
surrou nd ing it, they parked a huge empty truck with a
sign that read "Limonada for NADA." When the visitors
to the gallery approached the entrance, the members of
the group offered them a glass of lemonade. The gesture
was eccentric and fresh, and criticized the institution for
its neglect of local art, seeing it as a peripheral product. a
Three years later Provisional and Maldito Menendez
carried ou t a similar protest in Havana . At the time,
Robert Rauschen berg was presenting the larg est exhibit
ever held in the city, set up in the main exhi bit halls of the
most importan t institutions. 9 During a press conference
by Rauschenberg at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes,
Menendez showed up dressed as an Indian carrying a
bow and arrow; sat on the floor, directly across from the
artist, and remai ned there in silence, nodding during the
entire even t. In turn , the members of Provisional gave
him a painting bearing the inscription "Very Good,
Rauscher berg" and the fictional portrait of Hatuey, the
first kn own hero of Cuban history, who was also an
Indian . They also got Rauschenberg to autograph a
poster advertising his exhibit.
Besides the intellectual limitation implicit in judging art
inside anrl ou tside Cuba by different standards, there is
also th e u ~ sumption of a false dichotomy which would
deem the art produced in Havana as avant-garde -on
account of its being imbued by the dynamics of the
Revolution- while that produced in Miami (where most
exiled artists live) as conservative and reactionary. There
are two main issues in this presupposition. First, that the
Cuban exile is made up of the upper-class oligarchy
whose interests were affected by the rise of the
Communists to power in 1959. This stereotype is still
deeply rooted today, despite the fact that as early as
1965, the Cuban exile demographic had diversified
with the Camarioca exodus (made up mostly of
professionals and small business owners), and in 1980
was radically changed by the Mariel boatlift, which
included many sectors of the population . The second
issue has to do with geography: the assumption is that
since Miami is a beach and tourist town, it would be
incapable of producing something culturally worthwhile.l o
The sum of these factors is conclusive: The art produced
in Miami would necessarily be something nostalgic and
elitist, or airport-style.
But the reality is very different. A great deal of art
produced by artists in exile has covered cultural ground
that had been ignored or had been censored by the
dictatorship. This too is a reason to avoid isolating such
production under the pretext that it does not deal with
"Cuban themes." Among the most significant works in
this vein are Cesar Trasobares's foray into the aesthetic
of quinceaneras (a girl's coming of age at 15) and
Carmel ita Tropicana 's exploration of cabaret culture .J 1
Likewise, Ana Mendieta's early work on expressions of
violence on the female body and Tony Labat's reflections
on ma ss media are topics that have been practically
unexplored by artists on the island, despite being part
and parcel of contemporary Cuban culture.
Constrained by the prejudice noted above, many
authors have ignored fascinating artists and processes
which no doubt will become part of the history of Cuban
art when the current historical circumstance of the
dictatorship is overcome.J2 This essay attempts to
continue the work begun by Tania Bruguera with Ana
Mendieta's oeuvre, discovering the "traces of Cuban
blood " spilled in art actions performed anywhere, in
order to integrate them into the existing historical
discourse on performance art.
183
 Everything in Its Place: The True Volumen I
If we took Luis Camnitzer's thesis to heart that the
Tupamaro guerilla movement is part of a Latin American
conceptual art tradition that links up with politics, 13 it
would be very difficult to locate the beginning of Cuba's
explorations in performance art. On the left, one could
point to the kidnapping of the race car driver, Juan
Manuel Fangio, by members of the 261hof July Movement
in 1958; or, on the right (why not?) one could note the
ambiguous gesture of the ex-president Ramon Grau San
Martin during the Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961) who
placed a huge sign on the far;:ade of his home with the
inscription "Venceremos" (We Will Prevail). We could
even venture to deem apostle Jose Marti as the precursor
of performance art, when he left his coat at the home of
th e Baralt family before head ing out into the cold New
York streets, the day before he sailed to Cuba to begi n
the War of Independence (1895). '4 This would grant an
aura of sanctity to the genre, as occurs with everything
connected to Cuba's national hero. But we will limit
ourselves only to art actions that have been performed
with the conscious intention of interfering with the course
of art history, although at times such interferences were
performed outside traditionally accepted art venues (a
baseball stadium, for instance) .
According to the myth propagated by the official Cuban
discourse, and which has become dogma with the local
spokespeople, it all began with the exhibit Vofumen I
( 1980), as th e titl e itself wou ld indicate. Is The truth is
that the pioneer expressions of Cuban action art -and
other mediums that are not regarded in thi s essay- are
to be found elsewhere and at a different moment, so a
review of history would be useful here.
In his research on performance art in Cuba, The
Chronology (La Cronologia, 1998-2007), the artist and
curator Glexis Novoa points to Samuel Feij6o as a
precursor who instinctively took the elements of Dada
happenings and adapted them to his presentations and
lectu re s: "The audience wai ted anxiously to see what
was inside a bag he carried everywhere, from which he
would pull out a series of objects (shoes, sweet potatoes,
stones) he would use as props when arguing a point or
defending a thesis." J6 Feij6o was a noted Cuban folklorist,
a tireless promoter of popular art, and a founder/ editor
84
of important cultural reviews . Based in Santa Clara , th e
then-province of Las Villas, he was nonetheless an
influential figure on the entire island and particularly in
Cienfuegos, a city where he first performed art action s.
Aldo Menendez recalls that at the end of the 1960s, he
would accompany Feij6o to a field where they would
alter the order of cow droppings, pretending to crea te a
work of art. Some time later, Benjamin Duarte, who by
then was over seventy, "organized events in which he
would dress up in specific colors matching the colors of
the food he would prepare and immediately ingest."11
Around the same time, young artists who grew up
outside of Cuba and were trained in professional art
schools laid down the foundations of the genre and set J
up certain thematic paths . Ana Mendieta was clearly th e
leading figure in this movement. From 1972 on, she 1
developed a solid oeuvre based on the performative
nature of ritual. Mendieta integrated the elements of the
Afro-Cuban tradition of santeria to a more com plex
model that highlighted the notion of the sacred natu re
of the feminine body. The body is subjected to various ]
actions : from physical and symbolic aggression, ritua l
sacra liza tion (often using materials such as blood , soil,
and feathers), to its transformation in a silhouette (in the
J
shape of a praying soul) added to the natural
landscape. 's Her ability to appropriate and synthesize ]
aspects of Land Art, Body·Art, and Feminism turned her
into a kind of "compendium" of the various experimental
trend s of the period. Hence, when she visited Cu ba ,
J
Mendieta became a cata lyst for young creators who
were eager to try out new means of expression.
The tendency to appropriate elements from Afro-Cu ban
syncretic systems and non-Western cu ltures in general has
J
been continued by a variety of different artists, including
Leandro Solo-who is closest to Mendieta's generation- J
Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, and Manuel Mendive.
Campos Pons reoriented her work towards the themes of
the sexua lization/ raciali zation of her body, aMer being
I J
exposed to the work of Lorna Simpson and Carrie Moe
Weem s during a residency in Bosto n. ' 0 Mendive 's
work mixes painting on dancers' bodies wi th dance
performances in the form of large processions. He was th e
first artist to obtain an international prize for a performance
J
work (Fi rst Prize at Bienal de La Habana, 1986).
 1
l
l
l
1
I Tcdos Estrel las (All Stars). iLa plastica joven se dedica a/ baseball, par Ia recreaci6n, Ia cultura fisica y el depone' (Cuban Visual Artists Dedicate Themselves to
[.a;eba/1, for Recreation. Physical Culture Jnd Sportl). Jose Antonio Echeverria Sports Center. Vedado, University of Havana. Cuba. 1989
!1. San Fran ci sco, Carlos Gutierrez-Solano and Tony
l·)bat introduced a var iation of the performance in a
lig hter, humorou s tone, which has often been attractive
to Cuban artists. '' Gutierrez-Solano parodied abstract
expres sionist drip paintings with a type of ritual
exorcism. :> ! Eventually, Gutierrez-Solano would abandon
hi s work as an artist for a career as a curator. In 1976,
Lobat joined the San Francisco Art Institute. He bega n a
series of humoristic works such as Cardinal Hum ors
(1977), in which he appeared on a stage wearing a
mask and a zoomorphi c outfit wi th a targ et as
background He poured liquids from four containers
labeled "blood, " "phlegm, " "cholera, " and "melancholy"
whi ch represented "the four ma in fluids .. . responsible
b U11 i11dividual 's hea lth and disposition ." '2
In terestingly, th e "dripping" motif is a recurren t one in
artists wh o attempt to provoke a reaction in th e
audience. At the Festival de Ia Pieza Carta (1979),n
Julio Garcia (Pirosmani) "would squeeze out tubes of
Holland oi l paint he would pour on hi s mu sc les in a
gesture of body-building exhibitioni sm," whi le he
knocked down a model of Tatlin 's spiral tower that he
built using hou sehold furniture. Wi th this action,
Pirosmani revealed "th e mediocrity of the art supplies
com ing from socialist countriesl/ "4 Novoa himself had
his own dripping episode when he performed It's Not
Just What You See (Noes solo lo que ves , 1986). A
monitor was set up in th e gallery showing a heavy metal
concert by groups such as Venom , Metall ica , and
Slayer. Suddenly, the artist tore through a piece of paper
185

Tony Labat with Bruce Pollack, Bruce and Tony on the variety program The Gong Show, NBC Studios, Los Angeles. CA. US, October 28, 1979
covering the entrance to th e gallery and appeared
before the audience wearing a special rock star outfit
and brandishing a knife. He cut up his outfit and pulled
out his "entra ils" while he dripped blood. He then roll ed
around and afterwards quietly withdrew.2s
Labat had arrived in San Francisco from Miami, where
he performed his first actions in 197 4. At the time,
he was studying in the Miam i Dade Jr. College, where
he used a group of students to create a line at the foot
of a stairwell. His actions were performed in open
spaces and often in the College's facilities . The arti st
remembers that the art scene in Miami was not very
receptive to this type of work, and following a
professor's advice, he decided to continue his studies at
186
)
I
th e San Francisco Art In sti tute, where he eventua l!
joined the faculty26 Some of his more noteworthy wod- ~
deal with the mass media, such as The Gong Sh oh'
(1978 ) and Kidnap Attempt (1978) .27 1n Fight (198 1),
Labat became a licensed professional boxer in the sta te
of California for a year. During that time, his studio J
became a functioning gym open to the public, complete
with a ring and training gear. The project conclud ed
with his debut in a professional boxing match .2s
I
The situation in Miami would progressively chang e. J
Among the factors responsible for such a change are !he
creation of several institutions, the development of publ ic
art projects that had a major impact on the artistic
community, and the creation of art prizes, such as tlv'
J
Cinta s Fellowship for Cuban artists. 29 In this context, a
group of artists began to renew artistic production using
techniques such as performance, installation, and video.
Am ong them are Marla Brito, Pablo Cano, Adalberto
Delgado, Fernando Garda, KMAN, Cesar Trasobares,
and others. Th is generation of artists grew up mostly in
th e United States, and was therefore generationally
opposed to the "establishment" dominated by a few
veterans from Cuban modernism and artists who were
lin ked to the conservative aesthetic of the Academia de
San Alejandro. This "opposition" did not express itself
very concretely because the artists were active mostly in
theAmerican art circuit. Nevertheless, some disagreements
were noted, particularly one that featured Cesar Trasobares
during the show Re-encuentro cuba no (1978).
Starti ng in 1975, Trasobares had begun doing research
into the aesthetic of quinceaiieras and the industry
around this social phenomenon . In pieces that adopted
uncon ventional media and techniques, the artist
identified the sources of the various styles. He would use
such media and techniques to create boxes, collages,
installations, and mobile sculptures, two of which he
subm itted as entries to the organizers of the show. The
rej ection of his submissions on the premise that he was
nci using "noble materials" was understood by the artist
as a hypocritical gesture, because it not only excluded
him, but also the quinceaiiera as the embodiment of the
ta ste of a certain social class -the same group that
supported academic art. Trasobares, who was not
invi ed to the opening , nevertheless attended in the
c rq.J ny of a quinceaiiera (his cousin), who wore the
traditional outfit and carried a book on modern art
in her hand. They walked around tracing a double
rectang le and a number eight: a kind of curse, according
to popular tradition . Subsequently, Trasobares created
several performances using the figure of the quinceaiiera
in more festive environments. As well he has often
attended public events wearing outlandish costumes .Jo
An olher fascinating artist is Fernando Garcia. His
actions took many shapes, from a giant balloon parade
(Holiday Spheres, 1984) and a symphony of readings
in various languages in the Plaza of the Miami-Dade
Cultural Center, to long walks through geometrically
preoetermined spaces in the city along which objects of
similar shape were photographed -for instance, a stop
sign, a hole on the street, a circular window. Trained as
a mathematician, Garda studied art at Georgia State
University (1974-1976) and in 1976 moved to New York,
where he was employed as an exhibition preparator
at Leo Castelli Gallery. There he came into contact with
the work of Hanne Darboven, Daniel Buren, and other
European conceptual artists. When he returned to
Miami in 1978, Garda quickly joined the local art
scene, developing a sui generis oeuvre that was close
to conceptual art and abstraction . His obsession
with numbers and geometry led him to do day or
calendar counts and inspired two of his more significant
projects : BH/2 (1981) and On the Line (1982) . These
multidisciplinary events consisted in the simultaneous
organization of three and two exhibits, respectively, in
spaces that were not necessarily artistic . The first formed
a triangle (the title is the mathematical formula for the area
of a triangle) and the second, a line. Among numerous
actions there was one in which the artist would call on
the phone and give instructions to create a "drawing on
the line."JJ Garcia also worked at the Miami-Dade Public
Library, and realized several works related to literature.
Besides the Miami Reading Symphonies (1984), he wrote
a poem on concrete, which he entitled "Concrete Poem"
in reference to the Brazilian movement of the same name.
Further away, in Puerto Rico, Felix Gonzalez-Torres made
forays into art action, first in the company of two other
Cubans, Rosa Balsera and Jose Perez Mesa. Two of hi s
ephemeral works we re carried out on the campus of the
University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, where they were
studying 32The first project consisted in wrapping a dried
out tree in the middle of a busy University plaza with
cloth ( 1978). The goal of the action was to observe the
reactions of the public, and in a review of the action,
Gonzalez-Torres said that passers-by did not remember
that a tree had been there, and they thought it was a new
statue that was going to be unveiled any day. Later, the
trio created an ephemeral installation with ice and papier
mache. Gonzalez-Torres carried out the next action by
himself. It consisted of two persons sitting in front of (and
wired to) TV monitors with no signal.
In 1979, Gonzalez-Torres moved to New York in order
to continue his studies. During his constant visits to Puerto
187

~
f· .
.J
Fernando Garcia, BW:.'. ~' liami. FL. US , 1981
Rico, he created numerous pro jects including at least two
performances impersonating a tourist. His work Rust:
Dreams on a Bed of Ice (Oxido: Sueiios sobre una
coma de hielo, 1982) took place in Coso Aboy, as part
of his solo show there. In this piece, Gonzalez-Torres
appeared dressed in a bathing suit. He sunbathed and
then laid down on several blocks of ice, posi ng as Adam
in Michelangelo's Creation in the Sistine Chapel, and
began a diatribe on the entertainmen t culture that forc es
him to " be on vacation in his own land." n Another
project, La playa (The Beach , 198 3), which was never
carried out, was a video-installation and a performance
in which th e mti st imagined th e unusual situation of a
1
1
1
I
l
l
I
beach (an escape for the vacation traveler and ilu I
Caribbean migrant) on wh ich a token touri st meets a
rafter or yolero just arrived from Cuba, the Domi nican
Republic , or Haiti.J"
This group of artists created an avant-garde of Cuban 1
action art in exile, which fed on a "popular vein" th ai
was at the same time critical and celebratmy of its own
cu lture. The very fact that such forms of experimentati on
J
existed , while on the island they faced enorm o u ~
limitations due to the cultura l leadership in th e period,
is suffic ient reason for them to be recogn ized as
contributions to Cuban mi. As this volume demon stra k. ,
 Cuba was behind its contemporaries in Latin America,
which was different from what had happened in
previous decades. Some time wou ld have to go by until
new artistic trends would take shape and have
international repercussions. That moment occurred in the
mid-1980s, and it was characterized predominantly by
group actions and leading figu res that flourished or
vanished in the subsequent decade.
Volumen II
In terms of performance art strictly speaking, the contribution
of the exhibit Volumen II was significant although it was
not volum inous.Js In the first place, some artists organized
and participated in the Festival de Ia Pieza Carta (1979),
in a beach house in the outskirts of Havana. Secondly,
Leandro Solo, and to a lesser degree, Gustavo Perez
Monzon with his studen ts, created performances and
ephemeral actions with a certain regularity.
No graphic testimonies of the Festival have been
published, but Novoa has produced a very detailed
account of some of the actions:
Querida Stella (Dear Stella), Gustavo Perez Monzon
showed his admiration for Frank Stella's oeuvre in
1 a very subtle way. The artist made an actress lie
down on a piece of striped cloth spread out on the
floor, and he then traced her silhouette using small
pins, as if it were a sewing pattern. He carefully
cut out the silhouette and made the model
'd isappear" as if it were a magic trick.
(... )Works with social and political content-such
as vigi lance and repression-had an important
place. An example was the singular escape
password, A/fa Tasgolfo , created by Gory and
Ra ul de Ia Nuez, at the sound of which the artists
would suddenly flee until they disappeared
completely and created a tumult in the audience.
For their part, Jose Bedia and Flavio Garciandia,
enacted Una noche en Ia opera (A Night at the
Opera) impersonating burly security agents who
tried to prevent access to a make-believe opera
performance-in a room in the house-and ended
t;p being ridiculously run over by the audience.
Other actions would comment on the poor quality
of consumer products . In El Polio Canadiense
(Canadian Chicken), Ricardo Rodriguez Brey and
Bed ia sadistica lly butchered a smal l plastic do ll
with an ax, alluding to the paltry chicken rations
imported from Canada .36
Encouraged by his contemporaries' explorations into
experimental genres such as insta llations, Leandro Solo
developed an early outdoor performative work in which
he used everyday objects found on location in order to
produce composed arrays . This explains the highly
formalistic nature of his first works . In Mutant on Avenue
0 (Mutante en Avenida 0, 1979), Solo arranged empty
food cans in geometric pa tterns that matched the gaps
in the pavement. In that way he made drivers notice and
forced them to change their routine paths. Man and
Ropes (EI hombre y los estrobos, 1979) was performed
on a beach in Cienfuegos at sunset.J? The artist created
severa l arrangements of old ropes on a piece of sail he
had gathered from the sea. Solo metaphorically
represented the beauty and memory of used objects
rendered old by water.
Pogolotti-Brecht-20'h Century (February 22-23 , 1986),
the first "plastic action" performed in an exhibition hall
at Museo Nacional de Bellas Aries, was led by Leandro
Solo in collaboration with the architect Juan Luis Morales
and the actress Anabel Leal. Apparently, the "action"
had a strong theatrical component. Alejandro G. Alonso
reviewed that "four spotlights delimited the area " (a few
meter·s of exhibition space), where through th e use
of "minimal stage props," " simple bod y movements,"
and the music from Kurt Weill 's Threepenny Opera ,
they created "dramatic tableaux" inspired by Pogolotti's
work. The intention was to underscore the connections
between the Cuban pain ter and the German playwrigh t
Bertoli Brecht. The event was part of the closin g
ceremony of a retrospective of Pogolotti 's work .··· Sc.to
had been continuously developing an oeuvre with lesser
known works, although they were clearly influential in
establi shing him as the action artist in Cuba. His pieces
were "instal lation/montages" of war scenes in which he
developed a kind of "militia and bandit" game with
professional actors . These pieces were part of a larger
series in which Solo explored the historical mythology of
189
 the Cuban Revolution, wi th works dedicated to hi s
grandfather (a mambf fighter), his uncle (a builder), and
his father (a militia man) .39
If, among the artists in exile, the first performance
experiments happened in art schools, in Cuba it was a
completely different story. Cuban academia did not value
or encourage these kinds of experiments. For instance, it
was as late as 1987 when lnstituto Superior de Arte (ISA)
organized a Festival de Ia Creacion e lnvestigacion, a
launching pad for non-traditional art forms. By then, art
actions were very much part of a lively art scene, and
among their practitioners one could find teachers and
students alike. At times, certain spare-time activities
promoted the performance of art actions, which explains
their sporadic appearance. This is the case of the Festival
de Ia Pieza Carta, and that of Hexagono: Equipo de
Creacion Colectiva (1982) , which was crea ted during a
vaca tion the members of the group spent together.
Hexagono performed outdoor actions and landscape
interventions, which were heavily influenced by Jean
Dibbets .4o Later, the group took part in failed projects of
social integration, such as Art in the Factory (Arte en Ia
Fabrica, 1983), in which they used industrial materials to
create ephemeral environments.
Several factors led to the explosion of art actions in
1986. Among them , the II Bienal de La Habana, which
had already shown its power to bring together different
generations in its first edition. ·' 1 It was in thi s context that
Manuel Mendive was awarded th e First Prize for his
performance Moving Paintings (Cuadros moviles). Ana
Mend ieta's recent death was also remembered during
this event. At that point too, Tania Bruguera began her
series Homage to Ana Mendieta, remaking some of her
performances and sculptures.
Finally, an isolated action performed by Consuela
Castaneda and Humberto Castro acted as a lightning
rod. It was what Novoa has described as an "assault,"
using the official rhetoric of the time . Costumed as Penis
and Vagina, and spilling a liquid on the audience, the
artists interrupted a panel on "Art and Sex," at th e
headquarters of UNEAC, made up of prominent figures
such as the director of the National Center for Sex
Education, Monika Krause, filmmaker Toma s Gutie1Tez
190
Alea, writer Reina Maria Rodriguez, and critic and
curator Gerardo Mosquera. Out of fear of retaliatio n,
Castaneda and Castro denied to be the authors of the
actions. The most important thing, however, was that th e
surprise "assault" would become the rule for art action s,
adding a disruptive feature to the genre. From then on ,
this type of action "invaded gallery openings in Havana ."42
The works by Arte Calle and Provisional mention ed
above inscribe themselves in this tradition . Actually,
these groups were constantly responding one to another.
For instance, during the assault of We Don't Want to Be
Intoxicated, by Arte Calle, Provisional carried out its
own intervention, Japan (Japan , 1988) handing out
prizes to several panelists. Another episode took
place during the opening of a show by Arte Calle at
Galeria L (January 11, 1988) when the four members of J
Provisional appeared dressed up as peasants an d
carrying musical instruments they used to "mistreat" the
audience. Country music was in opposition to the 1
"freakish" spirit of Arte Calle.43
I
Besides the work of art collectives -a subject on whi ch
much has been written- there were also individual
actions that are worth noting. These can be divided into
I
two categories: artists who made performance a centra l
part of their work (Tania Bruguera, Juan-Si Gonzalez, ]
and Alejandro Lopez) and those who perform ed
sporadic actions -sometimes just one- but were
very sign ificant (Carlos Rodriguez Cardenas, Lazmo
J
Saavedra, Arturo Cuenca, Alonso Mateo, and An ge:
Delgado). All, except for Saavedra, ended up going into 1
exile, some sooner than others, as a result of the clirn at ,
of repression and censorship that became the ,-ul e
between 1987 and 1990_44
I
Gonzalez wa s a member of the group Art-De (l ater J
rebaptized as Ritual Art-De), but besides his activiti e:,
with thi s group, he created performances in which ~
often sub jected his body to limited situations . Some
of these situations emerged from a natural dialogue
with the group itself, since they approached hum an
rights issues. In Ritual/Body Art (Ritual/ Arte Cuerpo,
1988-1989) he painted part of his half-naked body like
the sky -notably influenced by Manuel Mendive's
perfol-mance- and placed himself at the intersection -:f
1·

Leandro Soto, Mutante en Avenida O(Mutant at Avenue 0), Avenue 0, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1979

191

Arturo Cuenca, Castillo de Ia Real Fuerza. Ciencia e ldeolog1a
(Castle uf the Roval Fotcd. Science I·S ldeulogvl.
CilstiL uf ti:c Ru1al F ret., Ha1Jr:a. Cuba, April- . :a , 1989
192
two busy roads in Havana . He spun around until he
collapsed from exhaustion. After his move to the United
States, first to Miami and now living in Ohio, Gonzalez
maintained an interest in the genre and has crea ted
regular performances that deal wi th domestic politics .4s
Alejandro Lopez's signature event was an ambitious
work that attempted to revise the convergence of
philosophical, religious, and ideological discourses in a
context filled with empty rhetoric. He built very large
theater sets in which he would impersonate the character
of "Dr. A" from the "Intellect Brigade." When he moved
to New York, his work did not change significan tly.
The character became Super A, a superhero wearing a
white helmet who would deliver lectures based on
philosophical and scientific theories from the heights of
large fortified structures.
The builder motif had been present earlier in Rodriguez
Cardenas' work. However, in his case, the undertones
went from anthropological to open ly political. Finally,
the image evolved towards that of a "man/building,"
which would become his definitive sign ature. lr a
celebrated self-portrait, I Don't Exist, Only My Intention
(Yo no existo, solo mi intencion, 1987) , th e arti st
showed his body transformed into a brick wall wi th a
house in the place of the heart. Meanwhile, in Easy-To-
Acquire Originals (Originates faciles de adquirir, 1988)
he distributed serigraphs with the image of a wa ll he
covered with real cement. ~6 This experience that celebroies
constructi on contrasts that of Lazaro Saaved ra's nv .t
important action, though not his only one. Metam orpho.;i· .
Microbrigade (Metamorfo sis: Microbrigada, 1915Q\
involved the artist's participation in a microbrigade h n
year for the purpose of purchasing a house .!7 At the en r,
of this period, Saavedra gave up his "dream ," after
being traumatized by the experience. The proj ect Vv'CJ
supposed to conclude with the wake of th e microbriga .t::
participant as part of the show, The Sculptural Obier:t
(EI Objeto Escu!turado, 1990), but it was cen ored.
In 1989, the Castillo de Ia Fuerza Project was launche-L
It was a mechanism whereby public cultural offi cials and
ideologues tried to round up the most polemico l
discussions going on in the art scene. Arturo Cuenca
perceived this fact as a real show of force and reo cted
in o codifi ed way, in his exhibi t Castle of the , c;-ll
 Force: Science vs. Ideology (Castillo de Ia Real Fuerza:
Ciencia e Jdeologia , April-May, 1989.) Taking the
ca stle itself as subject matter for his exhibit, Cuenca
developed a symbolic vocabu lary in which he contrasted
modern, scientific thought, represented by work tools
(scissors, hammers, mallets) and the medieval ideology/
straitjacket, represented by the cloth es/ castle with its
medieval moat. In the text for the catalog, Cuenca
identified science as the "socia l legitimation of work
as a theoretical moment," while. ideology was "the
legitimation of the power of non-work," "false knowledge,
pseudosynthesis that legitimizes the non-work of the
dominant class." Thus ideology was practiced by the
"bureau-transported troops of ideolocrats," and power was
"only the 'fatuous phantom' of a specific castle." He ended
by procla iming, "Long live the power of work!" During
th e mo nth of the exhibit, the artist created performances
that sought to establish a debate with the viewers 4a
Al onso Mateo notes that in Hair Grows (EI pelo crece,
1989) he did not intend to protest. Nevertheless, it is
difficult to imag in e the series of images that show a
person seen from the back with a shaved head, and the
I date written on his back, would allude to anything other
than a prison. Perhaps for that reason, the piece was
never publicly shown. The artist created performances
sporadically. One well-known work was his impersonation
of Umberto Eco during the literary launch of a certain
book by the Italian semiotician. Umberto's Echo (EI Eco
de Urnberto, 1986), as this piece was entitled, played
with the ambiguity of signs, much in the same way
as Hair Grows4?
Th e relationship to prison acquires another dimension in
th e case of Angel Delgado. Following an unplanned
perform ance (his first one) during the opening of the show
Th e Sculptural Obiect (EI Obieto Esculturado, 1990),
Delgado was condemned to six months in prison . The
reason was the public scandal following his piece Hope
is the Last Thing That's Dying (La esperanza es lo ultimo
que se esteS perdiendo, 1990) that utilized Granma, the
offir.ial newspaper of th e Communist Party as a toilet. He
startled his colleagues by distributing among them cards
with the image of bones printed on them , an allusion to
th e loyalty of dogs .so He then formed a circle on the floor,
placeJ an issue of Granma with a pe1·fo1'0tion in it, and
defecated on it. Aher completing his sentence, Delgado
took some time to relaunch his career. He presented a
solo show at Espacio Aglutinador, the only alternative
gallery in the city. As part of this show, he included a
performance that consisted of remaining motionless under
the mosquito net used in his cell. Around him, he had
gathered his personal effects from his time in prison. From
then on, Delgado has used this medium ohen in his work.
Self-employed Workers
The decade of the eighties ended with a collective action
entitled )uego de Pelota (Baseball Game). The event
took place in the stadium of the Jose A. Echevarria
University sports facility, and many artists and art
promoters of the country partici paled. It was an utterly
subversive gesture in which the creators, bored with
the clumsy mechanisms of censorship, decided to protest
in an action dedicated to "the national sport." Novoa
credits Michelle Fuentes with the idea. The action
gathered thirty-five artists and two art critics, who made
up the Blue and Red teams. Many more joined th e action
and participated as spectators. 51 One of the organizers,
Ruben Torres Llorca tells that his role was to referee and
he did it arbitrarily. Likewise, the idea of organizing
another event in the form of a marathon was discussed.
The ra ce would allegorize the artist's plight -would be
"born" in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Aries and "d ie"
in the Castillo de Ia Fuerza. The marathon, however,
was never held- actual ly, it became a sort of regatta as
many artists left for ex ile.-'·
The mass exodus of creators produced a noticeable
vacuum in the panorama of the arts, particularly in action
art. Once the groups disbanded, the few artists that were
leh were isolated and, in the new condi tions of the dollar-
based economy, they ended up becoming "self-employed
workers, " using the official nomenclature. But it would be
inaccurate to say that performance art disappeared
altogether. It rather adopted forms that were more
(individually) concentrated. Group energy translated into
collaborative projects, which were created in a public
space with limited intensity. In this regard, a crucial role
was played by a handful of artists who had participated
in th e events of th e last decade, and whose teachings
and promotion kept perfot-mance art alive.
193
 Among many projects, it is worth mentioning The National
House (La Coso Nacional, 1990). Organized by Rene
Francisco Rodriguez with students from ISA, they would
intervene in tenement houses in Havana in order to repair
homes and assist the needy. The project developed into
DUPP (Desde Una Pragmatica Pedag6gica), and eventually
gave rise to a group formed by Rodriguez and his students.
Among the actions of Galeria DUPP was the intervention of
the department store La Epoca (2000), which they identified
as a substitute for the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, at
the time closed for renovation. "Stores are shaping people's
taste . Many go there as if to a museum: to see and not
touch."s3 Every member of the group chose a department
that could be related to his or her work and developed a
piece specific to it.
Tania Bruguera recorded the complex process of change
through the editorial project Memories of the Postwar
(1993-1994), which compiled texts by artists and
critics on the island and exile. Educated under the
pedagogical guidance of Juan Francisco Elso Padilla,
Bruguera exhibited, from the beginnings of her career,
an awareness of art as a political phenomenon . After
her series on Mendieta, which she worked on for about
a decade, she had a period of readjustment and
relatively small artistic production, which evolved towards
the proposals that would make her internationally famous
later on. The body's resistance to official discourse of the
so-called "Special Period ," her involvement with th e topic
of migration from the perspective of indigenous and non-
Western traditions, and the use of organic materials,
denoted her assimilation of the influences of her two
teachers. When she established herself in the international
art circuit, Bruguera was invited to teach at the University
of Chicago, where she is currently on the faculty.s4
In 1994, Sandra Ceballos and Ezequiel Suarez founded
Espacio Aglutinador, an alternative art space located
in Ceballos ' home. Some of the most important actions
of the last years have taken place in this space.
Angel Delgado's exhibit was a watershed event in that
it made it clear that Ag lutin ador wou ld fight against the
current of censorship and self-censorship that dominated
the art scene. Ceballos and Suarez created several
performances. Once they sat across from each other for
hours, doing nothing . As an homage to Carlos Garaicoa,
i 94
who produced photo-installations on the architectural ruins
of the city, Suarez carried out Every Artist That Leaves Is 0
Fragment That Gets Lost (Coda artista que se va es un
fragmento que se pierde, 1995). During the performance
he stood on top of scaffolding and damaged the ceiling
and walls of the gallery by beating on them.ss
Finally, Lazaro Saavedra maintained his teachin g
appointment at ISA while continuing his personal work.
Following his experience with the microbrigade, Saavedra
focused on installation and occasionally he would perform
actions in the context of his exhibits. For instance Free Fall
(Caida fibre , 1997) was an action in which he cut the
strings attaching numerous marionettes that were hanging
from the ceiling in battalion-style formation. But his main
contribution, however, was the authorship of a group of
thirteen students who created the group ENEMA in the
year 2000. ENEMA began their study of performance
based on collective reinterpretations of the classic works in
the genre. Actions created by one person were performed
by all members of the group in order to share the implicit
workload. In this way, they remained connected by means
of a rope tied to their waist for a week, instead of a yea r.
They also held a piece of ice in their arms until it melted.
They took turns in doing so to avoid physical injury.s6
ENEMA also published a magazine and prod uced
several videos parodying TV and documenting their own
works (Notinemas). From thi s group, several ori ginal
figures have emerged such as James Bonachea, Dion is ]
Flores, and Ariel Orozco Y Furthermore, ENEMA set ihe
basis for revi tali zed group practice, for groups sucl as
609 . Its members are women and th e group deol5 ''· ith
topics related to issues around the female body.
Some figures emerged in exile over the last two decade .
They incorporate action art into their expressive arrenol.
Felipe Dulzaides in San Francisco (where he co-teaches
with Tony Labat), Maritza Molina and George Sa nchez-
Calder6n in Miami, and Allora and Calzadilla in Puerto J
Rico are some of the most distinguished. Former member
of Provisional , Francisco Lastra and Israel Leon , settled
in Mexico and hove occasionally performed acti on s.
Because of her theater background, Dulzai des's
performances have a strong histrionic bent, but at times
this style gives way to more abstract work . I Ii~ J uo
performances with Rene Francisco Rodriguez, when the
latter was lecturing at the San Francisco Art Institute,
stood out for their use of the relationship between work
and documentation , alternating between these two
viewpoints when videotaping the performance . For her
part, Molina has begun to distinguish herself for an
oeuvre based on the critical revision of traditional gender
rel ation s. In Carrying Traditions (2005), she pulls a
waaon loaded with men dressed up in business suits.
Ear~er, in Covered by Tradition (2003), she lay down
on the ground and covered her face with a white dress
whi le th e rest of her body was naked.
The Cuban artistic community in exile was enriched by a
new wave of artists who emig rated at the beginning of the
1990s. Juan-Si Gonzalez (who emigrated via Costa Ri ca
to Miami and then Ohio), Leandro Soto (in Arizona) and
Alejandro Lopez (in New York) have continued cultivating
the genre. For Gonzalez, the change of med ium was less
complex because hi s work was already prim arily based
on the body. Soto secured a teaching position while
remai ning active, although he has leaned more and more
towards theater. Lopez, in turn, has had to limi t his
production due to the cost of his complex theater setti ngs.
Concerned about the disappearance of the histori cal
memory of the preceding period , Glexis Novoa and
Em ilio Perez carried out the research that resu lted in
The Chronology (1998), shown at the Miami Dade
Community College Gallery, reviving interest in a genre
that had had a negative impact on the economic success
of new Cuban artists . Novoa had played a leading rol e
in some of the key moments of the 1980s with individual
performances such as In the End Everyone Dances
Together (AI final todos bailan juntos, 1987), a break-
dance contest that brought all the members of Havana 's
"underground " to the gallery. He was also part of
the group Provisional . With The Chronology, Novoa,
now in exile, pa id the last homage to his generation
and to what it stand s for in the tradi tion of Cuban
performance art. What Bruguera did for Mendieta from
1988 onwards, Novoa has done for his colleagues ,
di spersed, exiled, and in threat of being erased from
the collective memory of Cuban art by the demons of
ob li vion. He even brough t Fide l Castro from his
rehabilitation home to personally confront him with th e
pasf.59 His dedica tion and gene ros ity has been th e
in sp iration and engi ne of thi s to-be-conti nued research...

1 No por mucho madrugar amanece mas temprano. Fototeca de Cuba, Havana, 1988. Also Alonso Mateo, Glexis Novoa, and Arte Calle performed
actions during the open ing of this exhibit, which was curated by Ruben Torres Llorca.
2 ·she would use her name and her titles bu t she would write down the year the pieces were reconstructed, for instance, 1986 or 1996. It was an
a'lempt to revive her, in some way." Roselee Goldberg, "Entrevista, " Tania Bruguera, 51, International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia
(Chicago: Pri nce Claus Fund for Cu lture and Development, 2005), 16.
3 'ruguera notes that she stopped recrea ting Mendieta's works when she found out that several art history students would devote a thesi s to Mendieta's
·~ .:~r k; she look this to be a sign that Mend ieta's legacy would finally be appreciated. Although a fe stival named Ana Mendieta was organized at
1'.' lEAC (National Un ion of Writers and Artists of Cuba , 1999), Mendieta's work-as that of mony performance artists-is still not represented in
' .- ga lleries of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes ever since she showed her series Esculturas rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures) in 1981 .
4 F'rld Castro has described his government as a "Dictatorship of the proletariat," a term used by Marxist-Leninist theoreticians to describe the
soc;alist system.
5 In ! .e official rhetoric, the military terms "desertion" and "treason " ore used to describe the cases of people who abandon the island. This entails
a punishment, which, in the case of culture, involves deleting them from historical memory.
6 Cn the occasion of having been invited as an artist to a show, KMAN showed up as Mr. Jupiter, with an enormous ringed sphere covering his
fn J. As pari of th e performance during the opening, the arti st distributed fliers that crilici ::Pd the Church . The gallery owner asked him to leave
the place, at wh ich point other artists picked up thei r works and left, shocking the audience. This gesture led a cri tic to ca ll the group "Food Spot,"
o'lhough they did not form a collective. Among them were Teo Freyles and Ana Pulido. KMAN, interview with the author, Miami, December, 2007.
7 For a study of the work by Cuban groups such as Calle, Provisional , and Ritual Art-De, see: Rachel Weiss: "Performing Revolution: Arle Calle, Grupo
Pr:Nisional, and the Response to the Cuban National Crisis, 1986- 1989," Collectivism after Modernism.· The Art of Social Imagination after 1945
(tv' in neapolis Un iversity of Mi nnesota Press, 2007) .
8 Ada lberto Delgado, Interviews with the author, November-December, 2007. NADA group had a strong resonance in the Miami art scene of the
moment. In less than a year, when NADA showed at the Museo Cubano de Arte y Cultura, its membersh ip had daubed. Other Cuban artists that
joined were Rafael Salazar and Esteban Va llejo.
9 The exhibit was entitled Rauschenberg Overseas Culture In terchange (R .O.C.I.) and unleashed a wave of criticism. In a review about the events at
th lecture, Tonel noted that, "The Iorge and exhausting show that Rauschenberg put on across all of Havana, remi nds us, inevitably, of the insularity
th J i l uban visual arts are a victim of" He later pointed out that "the idea [behind this show] was tha t it was possible for Rauschenberg to appropr iate

195
 everything with impunity in order to create his own work. " And he concludes,"this intrinsically showy operation was received with reservations or
a mix of irony and indifference by (perhaps the most active) port of Cuban visual artists. " Antonio Eligio (Tonel). " ... Paso Rauschenberg sabre el
mar," Revolucion y Culturo (Havana, May 1988), 39-47.
10 Recently a journalist for the New York Times repeated the cliche when attacking the construction of the Carnival Center for the Performing Art in
Miami arguing that, "The center is yet another case of Miami's overreaching in a desperate bid to be taken seriously." Kirk Semple, "Fits, starts
and painful bumps for Carnival Center in Miami," the New York Times, December 29, 2007.
11 Carmelite Tropicana, whose name refers to a famous cabaret in Havana, created "Pingalito Betancourt, " a bus driver who appears in works such
as Milk of Amnesia (1982), Memories of the Revolution (1987), and Chicas (Girls, 2000). She appropriates the figure of the cabaret comedian
to lampoon tropicalist stereotypes.
12 Many of the nineteenth century Cuban artworks now exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana were produced in exile during the
wars of independence (1868-1902).
13 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).
14 For an analysis of the place of this episode in the construction of a Jose Marti mortirology, see Antonio Jose Ponte, "EI abrigo de aire," Encuenft o
Cubano, no. 16- 17, Spring-Summer (Madrid, 2000), 45-52.
15 Volumen I, Centro de Arte lnternacional, Havana, 1980. The exhibition oponed on January 14, 1980, with works by Jose Bedia, Juan Franci sco
Elsa Padilla, Jose Manuel Fors, Flavia Gorciandia, Israel Leon, Rogelio Lopez Morin (Gory), Gustavo Perez Monzon, Ricardo Rodriguez Brey, Tom as
Sanchez, Leandro Soto, and Ruben Torres Llorca.
16 Glexis Novoa, "The Consecration of Mischief," Killing Time, exhibition catalog (New York: Exit Art, 2007-2008). Solo also points to Samuel
Feijoo as precursor of performance art en Cuba. See: Leandro Solo, "Performance in Cuba in the 1980s: A Personal Testimonio, " Corpus Delecti:
Performance Art of the Americas, ed. Coco Fusco (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 264-27 4.
17 Glexis Novoa, ibid.The author notes, "It is interesting that, in a remote context, in Paris in 1971, the Catalan artist Antoni Miralda (Barcel ono,
Spain, 1942) chose the same motif for one of his actions, Ritual en Cuatro Co/ores (Ritual in Four Colors)." I have adopted Novoa's truly
revolutionary stance of considering intuitive or so-called popular art expressions as contributors to the development of performance art in Cuba.
The separations between the "raw" and the "cooked " in art get in the way of a more comprehensive view of artistic phenomena. (In this cme
too, the "raw" Duarte was an excellent cook.)
18 For a comprehensive study of Mendieta's work, see Olga Vi so: Ana Mendieta, Earth Body: Sculpture and Performance, I 912- I 985, exhibiti on
catalog (Washington D.C. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Sm ithsonian Institution, 2004).
19 Lisa D. Freiman retells the experience of Campos Pons in the essay included in the catalog of her retrospective: Everything Is Separated by Water
(New Haven and London Indianapolis Museum of Art/ Yale University Press, 2007).
20 Tony Labat, in his video Babalu (1980), and George Sanchez-Calder6n in a video part of the installation Awaiting (1995), put forth a parodic
approach to popular religiosity. In both cases, they perform supposedly legitimate "ceremonies" that have a strong performative element. But ihese
I
are not performance pieces per se.
21 Interview with Tony Labat, San Francisco, January 2008.
22 Tony Laba t, Trust Me (San Francisco: New Langton Arts, 2005), 34-35. In other pieces, Labat exploi ts a certain "outsider" aesthetic in th e vein of
Cardinal Humors. On one occasion, he appeared naked and wearing a mask on a stage where a live band was playing, while Labat rocked lx!Ck
and forth in a boat with a ball hanging from his testicles. The piece was inspired by the Mariel boatli8 crisis and included a phone call to Lobat's
mother detailing the recipe for Cuban arroz congri, which is what inspired th e title of th e performance (Block Bean s 'n Rice, 1980) . Th e artis t ~d
already done oth er performances with punk roc k bands he called The Ass holes and The Puds (1979).
23 The Festival de Ia Pieza Coria (Festival of Shot1 Works) took place in a rented beach house in Brisas del Mar, o beach town outside of Havono, in 1Y7'Y .
24 Glexis Novoo, Ibid.
25 Glexis Novoa, ibid
26 Electronic mails (December, 2007), and interview with the author, Son Francisco, January, 2008.
27 In The Gong Show, the arti st appeared wi th Bruce Pollack on the televis ion series, mocking the host with a disparate per formance which
provoked their expulsion. Later on, he attempted the kidnapping of artist Lowell Darling, a media-hungr candidate running for Governor L r
Ca lifornia (Tony Labat, Ibid)
28 Tony Labat, Ibid
29 Helen Kohen mentions that some institutions very active at the moment were the Metropolitan Museum (in Kendal l, and later at The Biltmore, Cor:::;
Gables), Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Museo Cubano de Arte y Cultura , Bass Museum, Miomi Dade Public Library, which had an
amazing program of exhibitions in many of their branches, ond North Miami Center of Contemporary Art (the predecessor to today's MOCA).
Electronic mail, January 10, 2008.
30 Interview with the author, Miami, November 2007.
31 Gail Fix, "Fernando Garcia Between Past and Present," Mimeograph copy of "Art History 698" term paper for Dr. Olson, Spring 1980, 8. Va sari t
Archive, Miami-Dade Public Library. I'd like to thank Helen Kohen, who is in charge of the Vasari Archive, for her invaluable help. Kohen organi zed 'J
a retrospective show of Fernando Garcia's work in 2003; unfortunately, due to lack of funds , no publication was produced.
32 Eventually, Balsera would abandon the visual arts in favor of literoture, and Perez Mesa would become a professional photographer with a lonp
career at the University of Puerto Rico.
I
196
 33 This text was written on a blackboard hanging on the wall. As well as Fernando Garda, Gonzalez-Torres' early work was inspired by poetry Rust
included a poetry recital by Ale ida Amador, a close friend of the artist, who appeared in the promotional photo for the performance.
34 On Gonzalez-Torres's early work, see Elvis Fuentes, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Early Impressions, exhibition catalog (New York: El Museo del
Barrio, 2006.)
35 For 0 study of the exhibit Volumen I, here rebaptized as Volumen II, see: Luis Camni tzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
Although the book has many factual inaccuracies, it provides a lot of information about the show and its protagonists.

36 Glexis Novoa, Ibid.

37 Leandro Soto, Ibid.
38 Al~iandro G. Alonso, "Una accian pl6stica," Revolucion y Cultura (Havana: May, 1986.) Clipping from Glexis Novoa Archive, Miami. The event
signaled an apparent institutionalization of the medium, but the clashes between bureaucrats and artists ended thi s process, and at th e beginning
of the 1990s, performance wa s absent from the programs.
39 Leandro Solo, "Compartir lo vista, " Revolucion y Cultura (Havana, No. 7, 1984.) Clipping from Glexis Novoa Archive, Miami.
40 Glexis Novoa, Ibid.
41 Around the Bienal de La Habana, several even ts are carried out to take advantage of the presence of international visitors. Among the actions
performed in such context were Tania Bruguera's Studio Study (Estudio de taller, 1997) and Ezequiel Suarez's Off Revolutions (Fuera de
I. wvoluciones, 2000) .
42 Glexis Novoa, Ibid.
43 Glexis Novoa, interview with the author, Miami, November 2007.
44 Jllnong the exhibitions censored were solo shows of Tomas Esson (A tarro partido II, at Galeria 23 y 12, 1988), of ABTV group (Homage to Hans
f1aacke/ Homena;e a Nons f1aacke), and the duo Rene Francisco and Poniuan's Melodramatic artist (Artista melodramatico), at the Castillo de
Ia Real Fuerza in 1989. Also censored were the group shows Nueve alquimistas y un ciego (Nine alchemists and a blind man) at Galeria L,
University of Havana (1989), which caused th e firing of the gallery director, Marta Limia, and Cuban Art Today (Arte Cuba no Actua~, which was
sch duled to open in downtown Havana on November 15, 1991, during the Bienal de La f1abana- this exhibit wa s postponed several times and
finally moved to the outskirts of Havana. Some members of the groups Art-De, Arte Calle, and La Campana were detained.
45 Probably the most significant performative proiect by Juan-Si Gonzalez is Looking Inside for Cuba (200 l), in which he visited towns called Cuba
in several states of the United States, and took snapshots in fron t of public buildings, businesses, and billboards, signaling the sometimes ambiguous
character of displacement and exile.
46 Carlos Rodriguez Cardenas realized some of the most important actions of the decade, including the first sound action, Fresh Air Disturbed by a
HuTicane (Aire fresco moles/ado par un huracan) at the opening of the exhibit Cool and Fresh (Suave y fresco, La Casona, 1987).
47 This collective form of self-help crea ted in 1970 with the goal of allowing workers to build their homes was given a new boost in the mid-l980s.
But the amateur nature of the participants resulted in extremely poor-quality buildings, and the program was undermined by laziness, corruption,
or state intervention, since the state could manage and distribute the housing at will.
48 Arluro Cuenca, Interview with the author, Miami , January 2008.
49 A.ionso Mateo, Interview with the au thor, Miami, December 2007.
50 A1 r taliotion after Angel Delgado' action, the Director of the Centro para el Desarrollo de Ins Aries Visuoles, B alri z ..1\ulct was fired.
5 1 :J' xis N oa, The Con secra tion of Mischief."
52 0 ol History Interview with Ruben Torres Llorca, Miami, Smithsonian Archi ves of American Art (Jan uary 31, 1998). Available online at
!.:•:) / /www.aao .si .edu/ collections/ oralhislories/ transcripts/ torre s98. him.
53 Y~ ,r; Co ole, inter view with the author, Havana, 2000.
54 Tania Bruguera, Ibid.
55 Ordo Amaris's Cabinet converted Espacio Aglutinador into a crime scene in 2003, connoting the underground nature of it. See: Espacio
AEiutinodor El orfe es largo (Holland Prince Claus Founda tion, 2006.)
56 The works refer to the performances The Year of the Rope, 1983-1984, by Linda Montano-Tehching Hsieh, in which the two artists remained
aHoched with a rope during an entire year, and a performance in which Marina Abramavic holds a block of ice in her forearms.
57 Jamrs Bonachea impersonated a contortionist in Plastic Artist (EI ortista plastico, 2000). Dionis Flores has performed several actions related to hi
v,a experience in Angola as a soldier of the Cuban Army. Ariel Orozco's actions are more intimate and often allude to family rela tions. After his
rmAher died, he walked eight days in a row, from the cemetery to his house carrying a lead reprod uction of th e bag that his mother used to go
shopping (Weight Exercise/ E;ercicia de peso, 2003). See: Hector Anton Castillo, "Azores y desapariciones de Ari el Orozco," August 18, 2007.
Av:Jilable online at www.criticarte.com
58 Yuneikys Villalonga, "The Utopia of Living Together, " Killing Time, exhibition catalog (New York : Exit Art, 2007-2008.)
59 For the opening of the exhibition Killing Time at Exit Art, Novoa invited an impersonator of Fidel Castro, who became the Honorary Guest. A video
is online at v-tww.youtube.com

197
1
 The Body as Instrument of Expression: Action Art in the Dominican Republic
Sayuri Guzman
" ... art is a living experience, not an object hanging
from th e wall. Art must physically move us, shake us,
exci te us ... it is the body with all senses awake and in a
state of expectation, the only remainder of its action must
lie qu ietly in our memory ... "
- Geo Ripley
The Dom inican Republic is a place where the performative
is part of everyday life; it is alive in the streets.
1 Dominica ns are highly creative; they have the capacity
to Ia gh at their problems, and to express their ideas in
imaaes. For this reason , non-artistic actions seem like
perf~rmances to us, and we do not just refer to cultural
syncretism, the Dominican Gaga, or religious rites. I We
also speak of symbolic acts with a political and social
ch drge. Here I will only mention two. During the 14th
Pa n-American Games in 2003, the residents of the
Cristo Rey neighborhood in Santo Domingo , led by
Padre Rogelio,2 intervened on the streets with the action
Hunger Torch (Antorcha del hombre), in which a
fam ished man in athletic clothes held up a torch while a
crowd followed him, demanding better living conditions.
In another action, Angel Patricio Sosa Gonzalez,3 set
out on foot from Dajabon on August 4, 2006. He
carri ed a cross, and he headed to the National Palace
located 365 kilometers away. He was known to the
people simply as "The Man with the Cross, " and he
demcinded road repairs and the improvement of basic
services for his community.
But art actions are governed by another aesthetic reading .
I should clarify that in the Dominican Republic attitudes
towards art are not dogmatic. A painter could become a
sculptor tomorrow, and an installation artist could become
a cer mist, or vice versa. It therefore seems natural that
Domin ican artists, especially avant-garde ones, would
beg in to use the body as a means of expression .
Perform ance as an artistic medium emerged in several
parts of the world as a result of different circumstances
and aesthetic positions. In Europe, on the one hand, it
Geo Ririey, Chorreras rajas sabre fonda azul (Red Streams on a Blue Background). Escariche. GuadalaJara. Spain. 1982
developed in the postwar period, dominated by drama,
masochism, mysticism, and as a clear religious provocation.
In the United States, on the other hand, where works lack
the mythical-religious aspect, they were instead framed
by conceptual minimalism, the actions of everyday life,
and a strong interest in social and feminist issues.
In Latin America, the determining circumstances were
populations subjected to iron-willed emerging or outgoing
dictatorships, military interventions, coups d'etat, social
instability, etc . In the decade of the 1960s, the Dominican
Republic found itself in a state of expectation. In 1961 ,
Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was executed, thereby ending his
dictatorship, but by 1963, the new leader, Professor Juan
Bosch , was toppled by a coup, leading to the bloody civil
war of 1965. During this period, Maximo Aviles Biondo,
Ramon Oviedo, Ada Balcacer, Jose Cestero, and Silvano
Lora formed the group Cultural Front April 1965 (Frente
Cultural Abril 1965) and adopted a political and social
attitude. On bed linens, pieces of cardboard, and other
humble materials, they painted and wrote political
slogans calling for the return of constitutional rule. These
were mounted as political propaganda in actions all over
the Federal District.
These actions reinforced what Silvana Lora had been
doing with the Art and Liberation Group (Grupo Arte y
Liberacion), a collaborative founded in 1962 that
produced street interventions using live music, poetry,
and painting . As an avant-garde artist who was very
close to Arte Povera and Nouveaux Realisme, all of
Silvana's work was politically committed to the soc ial
causes he believed in and champion ed ideologically.
His actions could be considered "social/ artistic actions,"
a term Clemente Padin 4 used to describe his own
performances. Lora not only contributed to these causes
through his own work, but he also organized activities that
helped democratize art appreciation and development,
such as the Marginal Biennial (Bienal Marginal), which
took place in the neighborhood of Santa Barbara in
Santo Domingo. In hi s performance Hatuey's Route (La
199
 ruta de Hatuey, circa 1975), he traveled to Cuba in a monologue, but something more. When he traveled to
cayucos, mirroring the historical journey of the Indian Mexico, he came into contact with performance,
leader Hatuey, in his attempt to rebel against the Spanish carrying out performance interventions, including some
conquistadors . In 1992, to celebrate the Ouincentennary on television, as part of Group Sum (Grupo Sum a).9
(the 500-year anniversary of the "discovery" of America), Although his performance production in the Dominican
Lora again traveled in a cayuco, this time down the Republic has been prolific-including events in Santiago,
Ozama River. Dressed as a native, he shot arrows toward
the place where the Columbus Lighthouse was being
his native city, and as part of the Colectivo Chocolatero
of Puerto Plata-his contributions have remained, for the
1
dedicated in commemoration. For Silvana Lora, the most part, presence-based actions that have not been
native represented those who have been displaced and filmed or photographed. His live works have only been
abused by the forces of power. documented via the oral testimonies of the spectators
who were lucky enough to attend these performances.
Geo Ripley also investigates indigenous and black culture,
but rather diffe1·ently: from an anthropological perspective Soucy de Pellerano is another avant-garde artist who
with the use of ritual and symbolic altars in performances, became known as "La Maquinotrona" ("The Matron
1
happenings, and installations. Like various artists of his Machine-Maker") after she created Maquinotrou m, a
generation, many of his performances were carried out penetrable object assembled from steel plates and other
abroad: in Brazil, New York, Puerto Rico, France, Italy, found and recycled, assembled materials. Pellerano
and Venezuela. In one performance which occurred in created her machines and interacted with them in
the Dominican Republic, Decapitated Dove (Paloma actions she used to denounce not only the situati on of
l
degollada), Ripley cut a semicircle out of a white sheet of battered women, but also that of a mechanized society.
paper using a paper knife, and shaped it into a dove's Pellerano opened and closed the doors of her machi nes, ]
neck. He later presented it to the public as a torn piece of she turned them on, powered them with a stick, and u ed
paper. In 1979, during the 50th anniversary celebrations them as a reference for all the actions she perform ed. At
of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he presented times she placed herself in these environments for hours
1
his video-performance Pijao,6 produced in Colombia, and patiently waited for the arrival of visitors. Th e artist
thereby becoming the first Dominican artist to have shown still teaches at the National School of Fine Arts, and in J
his work at that institution. Man Painted in Red (Hombre her classes she talks to her students about performance
pintado de rojo) shocked audiences at the XIX Bienal de and its artistic possibilities. She co ntinues to perform
Sao Paulo in 1987. He arrived mounted on a horse, half- actions in which her students participate.
J
naked, his body painted in 1·ed . He guided the public to
an outdoor area where a ri tual was being celeb1·ated Du1·ing th e 1980s, Yi-Yoh Robles began reali zing odi ons J
around a fire to the sound of beating drums. In 1989, his that can be described as installation-perform ance . In
performance Ancestor Painted in Red (EI ancestro con el these, Yi-Yoh generally placed himself in the environrr,c 1.s
cuerpo pintado de rojo) was shown in Paris, Bona, of his installations and interacted with the viewer from a
Jarash, and London, and was considered a subversive privileged, god-like perspective. Robles 's installati ons do
Caribbean expressi on. Ripley was part of the Fan Group not follow a set pattern, but th ey all deal wi th the topics of J
(Grupo Abanicof and Th e Pluralists (Los Plu1·alistas), B playfulness, the earth , and the magical. Thi s artist worked
along with performance artist Orlando Menicucci. also with the concept of duration, remaining motion less J
for hours, dressed in a costume or naked in side his
In 1968, Menicucci carried out an improvi sati on-based installations. In the 1980s, Robles was part of the Spanish
presentation that was prai sed as a monologue at the group, Chaos (Caos) , ICJ and presented actions that
Universidad Cat6lica Madre y Maestro. In this piece, disrupted public spaces . In 1985, the artist jumped from
Menicucci gradually took off his clothes while he spoke the Juan Pablo Duarte Bridge down to the Ozama River.
about his life, walking across an empty frame placed on This action stopped the traffic on the bridge because it was
the stage. For Menicucci, this was not simply a believed that someone hod committed suicide.

200
Silvana Lora. La Ruta de Hatuey(Hatuey's Route). Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic. 1992 (originally 1975)

201

Geo Ripley, f/ ancestro con el cuerpo pintado en raja (Ancestor with Painted Red Body).
La Maison des Cultures du Monde, Paris, France, 1989
During the Biennials at th e former Galeria de Arte
Moderno (now Museo de Arte Moderno) , a stage was
specificall y set up for performances. ll At the time,
actions we re mostly shows intended to en tertain th e
public, and many of th e actions were linked to thea ter,
poetry, and dance . We shou ld mention here Marilyn
Galla rd o, who performed improvisation-based Afro-
Caribbean ritual dances. Gallardo puzzles her viewers
by bombarding them with messages and making them
focus on her every move, confronting them with political
advertising, social critique, or African folklore, depending
on the type of performance.
Significantly, the Domini can diaspora also includes
artistic pioneers such as Dionys Figueroa, l2 and
contemporary figures including Charo Oquet,l3 Nicolas
Dumit Estevez,l4 and Josefina Baez,l5 among others. In
202
1
1
)
]
th eir performances, the se artists approach topics sucl
as immigration, syncretism, fol klore , music , identi'y,
culinary arts, and Dominican national traits. ]
Beginning in 2000, performance art became muci.
J
stronger than ever before on the island, and wa
accompanied by a proliferation of performance even ts,
collectives, workshops, and meetings. Among them , we
could mention collectives such as Stuff (La Vaina) , The
Choca lateer Collective (Colectivo Chocolatero); event',
J
such as Warm Winter (Calida lnvierno), Chocopop.
Autumn Actions (Acciones de Otoiio) , Remapping:
Reformulando el mapa, New Caribbean Cartogra phy
(Nueva Cartografia del Caribe), Internationa l Festival of
Performance (Festival lnternacional de Performance), J
Lifesavers for Sabana de Ia Mar (Salvavidas para
Sabana de Ia Mar) l6; projects such as The Route Of
J
 Performance (La Ruta de Ia Performance), To the Limite
(AI Limite) , Night of Performance (Noche de
Performance), as well as the Diploma in Performance
Stud ies coordinated by Maja Hor and taught at
FLACSO. Artists involved nationally and internationally
in performance art include David Perez (known as
"karmadavis"), Jochi Munoz, Carlos Ortiz, Carya na
Casti llo, Lina Aybar, Polibio Diaz, Fermin Ceballos,
Every art movement goes th rough a life cycle: prehistory,
hi story, decadence, and renaissance. Performance as
an artistic vocabulary also has a historiography, and in
the Dominican Republic we find precursors in certain
artists and movements, some pioneers, some myths, and
we could even say an end , the ashes from which it could
later rise . We are witnessing a renewed interest on
th e part of Dominican arti sts to use th e body as a mode

1 Miguel Ramirez, Pascal Mecarriello, and Eliu Almonte . of expression.

Editor's Note: Dominican Gogo is a hybridized communal celebration brough t into the country from Haiti. It consists of comparsa processions
with musicians and dancers. The parade travels through the villages of the borderlands to attract people. It has a religious orig in related to Vodun;
th us, it is dedicated to the /oas and takes place during or close to the Holy Week.
2 Padre Rogelio Cruz was a priest at Cristo Rey Parish. After organizing the urban intervention Hunger Torch, he was transferred to another
parish. Cruz is now based in Villa Riva, Dom inican Republic.
" A resident of the community of Los Miches, Dajab6n, located on the border with Haiti, he began a walk of protest carrying a cross to demand
that President Leone! Fern andez fulfil l the public works he promised during his visi t to the border region on February 2, 2005.
4 Clemente Padln is an Uruguayan artist, experimental poet, performer, video maker, and "networker" who is very comm itted to social causes.
He wa s imprisoned during the mi litary dictatorsh ip of hi s country for his critical work.
5 Editor's note: Cayuco is a small ca noe, typically used by the natives in the sea. In hi s action, Lora required the constructi on of the cayuco from
a tree in the tradi tional method.
6 Editor's note: Piiao is the name of an ethnic group of the southern highlands of Colombia. Geo Ripley has written that this group was never seized
by Spa nish colonizers, and King Carlos I agreed to grant them land as a peace offering. Ripley's work pointed to the precarious situation in
which the group was living, due to the deserti fication of the land.
7 This cooperative venture, a symbiosis of art concepts which sought to authentically fuse cultures and attitudes among artists in the 1970s and
1980s, was founded by Rufino "Rufo" de Mingo.
8 This group emerged on February 22, 197 4, when Ma nuel Rueda delivered a long lecture at the National Library in San to Domingo entitled,
Key for a Plural Poetry" ("Clave para una poesia plural") in whic h he proposed a complete revision of the empty, unsubstantial, and bloody
-, poetry that was being written at the time by Dom inican poets as a result of th e stifling poli ti cal situation in the coun try brought about by the Ci vil
\Var of April 1965. The group carried out a few interventions.

I o The Group Sumo emerged in 1976 in the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, deriving from the Toller de Experimentaci6n Visual y Pinturo
Mural. One of its goals was to take art to the streets, put it in touch with those who have no access to the galleries, and to turn the common
J .-·~rso n into o port of the work.

f 1n , Jso founded by Spanish artist, Rufo de Mingo, this group of ar tists used the label, Chaos, to desi gnate themselves as a reaction against
,-~ Jssificatory fads and trends, to exist without being con ceptualized within the usual currents.
I 1 ~ Ed itor's note: The Biennials began in 1942, and accord ing to Marianne de Tolentino, these began to include performance in the "free'' category
os of 1979, along with the more traditional categories of sculpture, painting and drawing. See her essay, "EI Arte Actual en Ia Republica
Dominicana," Caribe Insular: Exclusion, Fragmentacion y Paraiso (Museo Extremeno e lberoamericano de Arte Contempor6neo y Coso de
.t.~m erica, Madrid, 1998). 287.

12 Fit ueroa executed conce ptual actions in San Juan, Puerto Ri co in th e 198 0s, when he as living and studying there.
12 Cl oro Oquet lives and works in Miami. She is an internationally exh ibiting artist and acti vist, and founding director and curator of Edge Zones,
' not-for-profit art space in the Miami neighborhood of Wynwood.
14 i'licol6s Dum it Estevez lives and works in New York. He has recently rece ived awards from the Michael Richards Fund of the Lower Manhattan
Cul tural Council, Puffin Foundation , Tides Foundation, Cen ter for Book Arts, Franklin Furnace, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.
15 J sefina B6ez is a performer, writer, educator and director, who in 1986 found ed Latinarte/ Ay Om be Theatre troupe collective.
16 Project by New York-based Dom inican artist Scherezade Garcia.

203
 Performance and Action Work in Central America, 1960-2000:
A Political and Aesthetic Choice
Virginia Perez-Ration
Writing about what happened in the arts in Central
America between 1960 and the beginning of the 1990s
is difficult enough, but when this concerns performance or
action work, it becomes an even more complex task. The
lack of documentation is even worse than it is generally
in the visual arts . This period was one of the most
conflictive ones in our recent hi story, and it has marked
the region in an indelible way: political strife, rebellion
and counterinsurgency, massive migration, and a peace
process that remains under question . In this context, the
few performances and actions that were executed were
usual ly not even considered art, and exist only in the
memory of those who witnessed them or through hearsay.
I would like to mention the inva luable help of colleagues
from the region, who have contributed information from
their personal experience or who gathered it in their
re spective contexts.r I will try, from various sources, to
present an overview, though incomplete, of initiatives that,
in some respect, prepared for what is happening in
the visual arts in Central America at the beginning of
the twenty-first century.
Among the first changes that the 1960s brought to the
isthmus' visual arts was th e re-assessment of traditional
urban areas as spaces for art. In March of 1961 , four
young Panamanian painters (Antonio Alvarado, Mario
Calvit, Alberto Dutary, Alfredo Si nclair·) presented an
exhibition in the historical area of Santo Domingo,
precisely where th e Flat Arch (Arco Chato) L used to
stand, as a way of recuperating the ruins and dedicating
that space to cultural purposes. This kind of activity,
which might not be classified as an action, but rather
could be considered an open-ai r exhibition, was, at that
time, an artistic statement that would loosen up archaic
structures. In fact, it had an activist character. A year
before, in Costa Rica, Juan Luis Rodriguez -considered
th e first artist in the country to question modernist
principles and open a path to a contemporary practice
oriented towards the relations between art and life-
organized a similar group event in a city park. Poetry
was written and shown on cardboard . Wicker masks
Rr.gina Jose Galindo, t Ouien puede borrar las hue/las? IWho Can Erase the Footprims?)
204
(made by one of the organizers, whose workshop acted
as headquarters for the group) were shown alongside
paintings, and spontaneous open discussions about the
exhibited works took place in the park itself. This event was
considered by the critics to be a new strategy on the part
of these artists, who "were approaching the people, and
finding respect and admiration ."J
Shortly after, Rodriguez left for France where he spent
twelve years until his return to Costa Rica in the early
1970s. While in Europe, known as Rodriguez Sibaia,
he experimented in environmental art while developi ng
his material painting on wood and non-traditi ona l
supports. He was invited to several editions of the
Biennale de Paris and, like many other international
artists, participated in politics with his French colleagues.
Due to this, he was expelled from France in May 196 8.
He fled to Brussels, and through a network of arti sts, he
was received by Marcel Broodthaers, whom he had
never met. Rodriguez spent th e following six months ot
Broodthaers 's home. He met many of the arti sts in
Broodthaers's circle, and participated in activities lin ked
to their work. In the winter of 1968 during a meeting in
Antwerp, Rodriguez Sibaia, Joseph Beuys, and a grou p
of artists il legally staying in Belgium built ice barricades
in the street. These structu res stopped the police fr om
entering the cafe where they were gathered, and reft>rr8d
to th e May 1968 events in Paris .4 Rodriguez retu rr.ed to
Paris in December of tha t year and kept up his ar!isL-:
activism, strongly influenced by his contact with Beuys.
Much of his work during th e second part of his stay in
Europe was marked by the 1968 student revo lution, ar d
hi s memorable action-piece, The Combat (f/ Combate),
which was selected for the VI Biennale de Paris of 1969.
Philippe Bouvard wrote in Le Figaro:
In the semi-darkness, the artist places chairs made
of bright red ice on a platform . While a group
beats on drums under an intelligent light scheme,
the loudspeakers broadcast interviews of form er
boxers and the noise of rowdy audiences recorded
Constitutional Court to National Palace of Guatemala. Guatemala City, 2003
 at the sports palace . Slowly, under the effect of the
heat, the chairs start to melt and they finally reduce
themselves to large bloody puddles on a white
platform. Devilishly instructive .s
Rodriguez Sibaja returned to Costa Rica in 1972, and
has produced few works since. However, he became the
most relevant figure at the art school for the younger
students . He is probably one of the most influential artists
of the generation that started its artistic practice in the
1980s. His influence, always controversial, was more
in relation to the role of the artist in society than to the
artwork itself. The Museums of the Central Bank of Costa
Rica organized a retrospective exhibition around
The Combat in 1995 and an extensive catalogue was
published. In 1996, at the XXIII Bienal de Sao Paulo,
Rodriguez built another ice piece in the garden outside
a building by Niemeyer. He built a platform and pyramid
of white ice blocks with a red and black ice question
mark on top . Inside the biennale galleries, he wrote his
poems with graphite on hand made sheets of rough
paper and tacked them to the walls. Known as "Juan
Diablo," he now keeps mostly to himself and his family
in San Jose . But for many artists, he still represe nts a
moment of change in the art history of Costa Rica.
It is worth mentioning two early actions by Luis Diaz, a
prize winning artist at the Primera Bienal Centroamericana
in San Jose, Costa Rica as well as the VII Bienal de Sao
Paulo, both held in 1971. Invited to represent his country
in the print section of the 1972 Biennale de Venezia, he
used the cast-iron covers of city sewer systems as a matrix
by fixing thin cardboard to those on Eleventh Street and
Sixth Avenue in the Zone One sector of Guatemala City.
For three hours, cars drove over the iron sewer tops,
embossing the image on the cardboard. From these, the
artist produced a series of four-by-six foot graphics entitled
Wh eel Prints (Grabados a Ia rueda). Jillya Kaplan ,
reporting from Artspace, noted that Diaz did not have a
proper printing press, and therefore decided to use thi s
alternative process.6 However, the work also examines a
new kind of awareness of the urban context and the
different aesthetic conditions produced by the material
elements of the city. During this time, most of Central
America was relatively rural, and therefore identity (and
art) was attached to tradition and ethnicity. Events linked to
206
the city itself, its inhabitants or urban rhythms, were almost
non-existent. The fact that Luis Diaz is also an architect, who
designed several well-known buildings in Guatemala City
in the 1970s, might explain his perspectives on art and its
processes, which at the time was revolutionary.
At the end of the 1970s, Antonio Alvarado, one of the
Panamanian artists who had organized the 1960 open-air
exhibition in The Flat Arch, was invited to show in Mexico.
He exhibited a series of empty frames, and he would
explain the works that could not be seen to the publ ic.
Apparently, he repeated this action in Panama . In 1981
at the art school of the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma
de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, he was invited to
create a virtual project for the exhibition, Un-Realized
Proiects (Proyectos no realizados).l He presented , in
collaboration with artist Eduardo Perez, the proposal for
a Panama Canal through the United States. This conceptual
intervention posited a "big ditch" in the North Ameri can
territory. Another Panamanian who looked for alternatives
to the common exhibition space was Alicia Vitteri . In 197r:,
she placed twenty of her prints in twenty city buses (one
in each) for an entire month, with the intention of ta king
art to the streets. After the exhibition , the works were
returned to the artist. In 1984, for the opening of the
exhibition, Of Carnivals and Funerals (De carnavales y
funeroles), at the Museo de Arte Contempor6n eo de
Panama (Contemporary Art Museum in Panama), she
created a collaborative piece through an action involving
the audience: a large mural piece was painted on a wa ll
of the museum, depicting people in funerals ond
carnivals. The attending public was incor·pomted into ihc
mural by lighting. A video documented the interacti on of
the audience with the painted scene, and included an
audio track recorded in one of the popular shopping
areas in downtown Panama City.
The First Performers or Action Artists
Margarita Azurdia (under the pseudonym Margot Fanjul)
was the first Central American artist to participate in an
international event with an individual performance . In
1970, she presented Please Take Off Your Shoes (Favor
quitarse los zapalos) at the II Colteier Biennale in
Medellin, Colombia. Thi s work consisted of asking the
public to take off their shoes and enter a cavern ous
 wooden construction with a sand-covered floor, which,
upon contact with bare feet, sought to arouse a sensorial
experience that invited the public to communicate with the
earth . Azurdia is a ground-breaking artist in many aspects.
She worked for many years with other women, engaging
in performances during the height of the counterinsurgent
war in Guatemala (none of which were documented) . Her
interest in planetary energies was a constant characteristic
in much of her later work, as a poet, a painter, and a
sculptor, and in the ritual dances and happenings that she
developed around the 1980s until the end of her life in
1998. From her first performance in 1970, all that is leh
is a dark, blurred image of the artist who is barely visible,
dimly lit by a small light. At the biennial, she also presented
a series of white marble sculptures assembled with screws,
so the public could turn and rotate their elements, thereby
interacting with the pieces. Her proposals drew a strong
response, and her presence transcended her own work.
The Biennale had also invited Luis Diaz, who could ·not
travel to Colombia for financial reasons, so he prepared a
piece, entitled Seven Radiograms with Instructions (Siete
radiogramas con instrucciones). The piece was conceived
with another Guatemalan architect, Cesi Novella, and it
consisted of sending the organizers a series of telegrams
with very simple instructions to follow, such as:
i I cover box white material stop suspend cable
ceiling knots every meter end touching center stop
await following instructions stop
Lui s Dioz recalls tha t the organizers had no idea how to
proceed, but Margot Fanjul helped in having the
instr cti ons placed in a visible area of her performance
space, thereby allowing for ample discussion of the kind
of work that Diaz and Novello were proposing.
In later years, "Margarita rita rico Dinomita" (as she
liked to call herse lf, after one of her poetry books) ,
organized dance workshops. This work was related to
North American schools of modern dance, which sought
to address the body in a deep and meaningful way. She
performed alone or in groups, in parks and other public
spaces . In 1974, she chose an open fi eld as the site to
present one of her major bodies of work, Homage to
Guatemala (Homenaje a Guatemala), a series of
polycn romed wooden sculptures inspired by the popular
culture and myths of both her country and her personal
imagery. This was a revolutionary act, which not only
rebelled against the gallery space, but also championed
nature. She maintained this attitude throughout her life,
and it earned her a reputation of madness. However,
for Guatemalan artists who knew her, or who started
their artistic practice before the 1990s, she is now a
referential figure, while the younger generation barely
knows her. Recently efforts have been made to create a
larger awareness of her relevance, and a portion of her
sculptures have been restored and exhibited. a
The Central American context between 1960 and the
end of the 1980s, coupled with the kind of art education
that prevailed at that time, did not really prepare artists
for actions or performance work. Most of what happened
up to the end of the 1980s was realized by those who
were able to travel in order to gain international
exposure or to pursue their artistic training. Panamanian
Manuel Montilla is an exception , as his work has hardly
transcended his home town of David, in the far province
of Chiriqui, close to the Costa Rican border. In
Metamorbosis, 1976, he locked himself up with a dog in
a tiny space cluttered with objects and artwork, but no
food. The public could watch the artist and the dog in
the enclosed area, as the artist sought to understand the
perception of space, and the way in which one relates to
the lim itations of it. Th is performance can be seen as
kindred to Beuys' 1974 action in New York, in which he
shared quarters with a coyote for three days.9 However,
Mantilla 's act dealt more wi th the physical and mental
experience of sharing a limited space with opposite
elements (a living animal and an accumulation of art-
related objects) than about the relations between nature
and technology. In any case, Mantilla was scorned by
the loca l community and hi s work dismissed as another
act of madness by a Chirican artist.
This kind of attitude was prevalent in the whole reg ion,
and many of the first actions or performances by Central
American artists took place abroad. Some were re-
enacted or revised for loca l presentation. Actions that
took place in the area are not only poorly documented
but stories and dates are confused and contradictory.
Contacts with the artists have, however, offered a bit of
insight into these first action works .
207

Regina Jose Galindo, La oy a gritar a/ vientu (I Will Shout it to the Wind), Post Office Building, Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1999
Otto Apuy studied for several years in Barcelona and
engaged in various actions there at the end of the 1970s.
One of these, realized at the Ciento Gallery in 1979,
was based on the viscosity of paint, but also carried a
strong sense of mourning. The artist poured thick, black,
oily paint down a structure of wooden sticks and cloth , to
the rhythm of Albinoni's Adagio, until the paint reached
the floor and became a black puddle. Upon his return to
Costa Rica , Apuy presented a version of this, which he
ca lled Index of Slipperiness (indice de resbalosidad) , at
the National Monument in 1986, thereby linking it to
local political history. The monument, located at the center
of a park near the Costa Rican congress, commemorates
the 1856 Campaign against W illiam Walker and his
band of filibusters .lv Apuy ca rried out his action on the
anniversary of the creation of the Costa Rican flag. The
artist built a fifteen-foot-high scaffolding to hold several
inclined panels onto which he poured gallon s of red,
white, and blue paint. However, he allowed the red
paint, symbolizing blood, to arrive alone at the end of
the stream. In 1985, Mantilla, in the very hot town of
David, created another piece entitled In-Freezing Space
.. 08
l
)
J
(EI espacio ingelante). A small child, dressed as a clown,
l
sat inside an industrial freezer with the door open fo r
severa l hours, while his parents and artists outside th e l
freezer would discuss top ics or speak in languages tha t
the chi ld could not understand. In-Freezing Space
alluded to th e idea of being in another place, as the ch ild
l
and adults confrontated one another through opposing
temperatures, one inside and the rest outside.
Raul Quintanilla has described an action that took plac
around 1987, at the ASCTC Gallery in Managu a,
I
Nicaragua for the opening of the RAT's show: JI
A professional dancer was hired to perform (the
original one never came, so we had to hire
another one who had not rehearsed) accompanied
by a sax, a bass, and a trumpet, which were
placed at the corners of the gallery. She did a
ritual dance for about ten minutes among the
public, and then approached a painti ng of mine J
called Take This Dagger (Toma esta daga). She
took a knife out that had been concealed in a plant
J
J
 pot, and stabbed the painting three times to the and was more connected to the global news than the
accompan iment of the music, and then turned others. He initiated the decade with a piece entitled, In
towa rd s the public as the lights went off. (This time Memory of Halabia, City of Silent Images (En memoria
it came out better than the first!) 12 de Halabia, ciudad de las imagenes silenciosas, 1990)
related to the massacre of Kurds in 1988 by Iraqi
Quintanilla also refers to an eccentric intervention at leader, Saddam Hussein. In a dimly lit space, the public
another openi ng, by Juan Bautista Juarez. He hopped had to crouch down to see three boxes: an image of a
around and performed some kind of ritualistic dance, little girl with damaged skin, an image of urban ruins,
holding a perforated bag of sand by a piece of rope, so and bones and fossils. The public had to negotiate the
that the sand would pour out as he danced. He finally piece carefully, while The Flight of the Bumble Bee by
ended by tearing the bag completely open and showering Rimsky Korsakov played over and over, as the artist gave
the public with sand. This took place at Galeria Xavier out a text informing the public about the massacre.l4
Kanton of Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales, Managua,
in th e group show, I Like, Like, Like (Me gusto gusto It is interesting to note th at performance has been, for th e
gusta) l3 and in relation to Quintanilla's work, As Time Cast most part, a feminine expression in Central America, at
Itself Upon Us: Homage To B. C. [Boanergues Cerrato] least between 1997 and 2002. Most of the artists
(Como el tiempo se nos vino encima. Homenaie a B.C. approached gender issues from diverse perspectives,
[Boanergues Cerrato]). Another artist who has done some close ly related to their particular living environment,
performance work is Arlstides Urena Ramos, who lives differing from Guatemala to Nicaragua to Costa Rica.
and works in Florence, Italy. At the end of 1988 he Priscilla Monge engaged in a solitary, unannounced
created a kind of multimedia action involving the sound public performance in the streets of San Jose in 1997,
of radio interference and an empty gallery space with a entitled Bloody Day (Dfa sangriento). Th e first day of her
single, unpainted canvas. Urena intervened at some point menstruation, dressed in a pair of trousers quilted with
by chang ing the music, hanging several paintings by his sanitary napkins, she proceeded to do normal errands
collaborators, and passing around platters with paper in town while the blood flowed, staining the seat of her
balls made of shredded essays about the exhibition. After trousers. The action was documented from a distance by
turning the space into his personal atelier, the artist a photographer, and the artist recalls the reactions of
disappeared without a word. Subsequently, Urena passers-by, ranging from indifference to disgust to
presented several performances in 1994 and 1997, concern. Monge has referred to menstruation in many
based on the musical motifs of Caribbean rhythms. of her pieces in a subtle and indirect way, using sanitary
napkins to create objects such as footballs and flags,
and building rooms for isolati on and protection , where
The 1Y90s: Performance as a Political Act blood is suggested rather than represented. Monge also
Many of the early actions described above were isolated produced the series, The Lessons (Las lecciones), a series
events and often a result of a collective initiative. However, of three videos between 1998 and 2000. In the second
a systematic research process in performance work itself and third lessons, the artist herself was the performer in
was not pursued. Performative actions in Central America How to (Un)dress (Como des-vestirse) and How to Die of
began to develop as an autonomous language for artistic Love (Como morir de am or) .1s In the first one, she danced
expression and activism around 1997, more or less at the and stripped in a quiet room, to the melody of a music
same time as video art. This was part of a dynamic box. However, the black-and-white video presented th e
process that emerged after the last peace treaty was strip in reverse: she started out naked and ended up
signed in 1996, end ing decades of regional conflicts. covered in more clothing than the usual stripper's garb. In
How to Die of Love, filmed in color, the artist was inspired
However, Manuel Montilla, still working in Panama, was by the aesthetics and tempo of soap operas. She played
one of the little-known artists to have continually worked the role of the subj ugated woma n, waiting endlessly for
in this mode. His country did not participate in open war her lover to arrive, weeping and watchi ng the time go by.

209
 Aher several hours, desperate, she picked up a gun and
shot herself in the mouth, spilling blood . The final image
shows Monge wiping her mouth clean and getting up
from her dresser, thereby modifying the usual tragic
ending. In her cynical play, nobody ever dies of love.
Performance became a major artistic statement in
Guatemala after the war, when citizens started to re-
occupy the public spaces that had been denied to them ,
and that had previously been strategic control points of
the military. 16 On the one hand, people in general
returned to the historic center of Guatemala and felt
somewhat liberated from the fears of a violent past, and
on the other, the lack of institutional infrastructure,
museums, galleries, or any proper exhibition space led
artists to create works to be performed out in the open .
The emergence of performance work in Guatemala,
particularly in 1999 and 2000, was unparalleled in the
region. The main figures that emerged around 1998
were primarily women: Regina Jose Galindo, Marla
Adela Dlaz, Sandra Monterroso, and Jessica Lagunas.
Dealing with the difficulty of being a woman in a context
such as Guatemala, each of them approached violence,
sexuality, subalternity, and feminism , and most were
poets as well. An important event took place in Guatemala
in 1999, curated by the PAl Group (Independent Art
Project) 11 in which most of them participated. Regina Jose
Galindo presented The Pain in a Handkerchief (EI dolor
en un paiiuelo): naked, tied to a standing stretcher in a
darkened room, Galindo's body served as a screen th at
received projected images from newspapers, showing
articles related to violence against women, rape, and
murder. That same year, Ga lindo had a solo show at the
Belia de Vico Gallery, where she presented a piece that
consolidated the transgressive character of nudity in her
work, The Sky Weeps So Much It Should Be a Woman
(EI cielo /lora tanto que deberia ser mujer) . The artist
entered a bathtub filled with water, immersing hersel f
time after time, almost drowning, and emerging only
barely to breathe. That same year, during the II Cultural
Festival in Guatemala City, Galindo hung herself from
the archway of the Post Office, located in an area where
a teeming black-market money exchange takes place.
Dressed in something that looked like an altar-boy's
vestment and held by a harness high above the street,
she read her poems out loud and then tore the pages
210
out of her book and threw them, creating chaos down in
the street while people scurried to pick up the flyi ng
pieces of paper. This was titled I Will Shout it to the
Wind (Lo voy a gritar a/ viento).
The following year, Galindo carried out several
performances that, when viewed retrospectively, were
in preparation for the more extreme actions that she has
performed since . One of them was We Are All Dying
(Todos estamos muriendoL realized during the 2000
symposium, Central Themes (Temas Centrales) .1 a It took
place in one of the tiny lookout towers of a former prison
that was converted into a cultural center. Crouched
naked and connected to an oxygen tank throu gh a
mask, she stayed in the tower approximately forty-five
minutes, until all the oxygen was consumed. In the
exhibition To Live Here (Vivir Aqu0, 19 Galindo injecled
herself with 10 milliliters of Valium, and fell unconscious
1
for several hours, as a reflection on the wish to escape
from the Guatemalan reality. Enclosures (Encierros) wa s 1
executed during the Parenthesis (Parentesis) group
exhibition at the Zoo .2o Galindo enclosed herself in a
concrete-block structure, placing the last block and
cement mortar from within the construction , and
remaining alone in the dark room for an undeterm ined l
time. She remained there until the concrete walls were
broken to release her. During Blue October (Octubre ]
azuiL a month-long event in the city coordinated by
Rosina Cazali, Galindo engaged in one of her most
compelling and shocking performances. In We Don 't
J
Lose Anything By Being Born (No perdemos nada con
nacerL the artist had herself placed into a body bag and
thrown almost unconscious in the municipal du mfJ ,)f
Guatemala. By positioning herself as human gmb \:)8 ,
J
she evoked the horror, shared by many Guatemalans, at
the lack of respect for life. The artist was invited that year
by Harald Szeemann to participate in the 2001
Biennale di Venezia, and again in 2005 by Rosa
Martinez, when she won the Golden Lion for a Young
J
Artist. Galindo is one of the strongest, most cons istent,
and courageous artists in the region. Since the '/ery
beginning, her work has been not only audaciou s, but
coherent, and characterized by a density in meaning .
While belonging to the specific context of Cen tral
America, at the same time, her pieces have the capacity
of transcending beyond th e Guatemalan situati 0n. c;he
 has a steely, gritty way of referring to the subaltern in last days of the exhibition, the artist's husband, Roni
society. While her works refer to women in particular, Moc6n (an artist himself), replaced the guard. Jessica
she in fact addresses any "Other" that is subject to Lagunas has also performed in her videos of a later
violen ce. Most of her performances are related directly date, applying make-up or nail polish obsessively over
to th e brutal patriarchal society in which she lives. On one hour, slowly disfiguring her lips, eyes, and nails .
many occasions, it is the endurance of the audience that
is tested through her actions . In later years, she has put Sandra Monterroso has spoken directly about power
herself in the place of the victims by subjecting her tiny structures and focused on the male-female equation, but
body to the same kind of violence that she denounces . her most accomplished works are from very recent
years.2 1 One of her first performances in 1999, called
Jessica Lagunas grew up in Guatemala, and is currently Phoenix (Ave Fenix) , referred to the peace agreements
living in New York. Her work focuses on the effects of a signed in 1996 in Guatemala. It included photographic
fash ion-driven society in which women make themselves images on red gelatin, one of them a partial view of a
dependent on looks . It also refers to the general macho naked woman. When the piece was censored at the
atti tude that considers women as private, personal exhibition venue (a local bank), the artist carried out part
property, and refers to these and other ideas of of the planned performance in the street.
exclusion. One of her first actions was initiated around
. 1999 and continued until she came to reside in New Nudity as a statement continues to be a controversial
. York in 2004. This consisted of placing a pair of red issue on the part of artists in Guatemala. This was the
hig h-heeled shoes in front of major art institution s case for Maria Adela Diaz, who, like Galindo, was also
wherever she traveled. However, they were always set a published poet. She presented two performances in
outsi de the institution s, on the border of these desired 1999 related to writing, contextualized in a painful or
spaces. They represented the exclusion of peripheral disgusting environment. While this transmitted the
arti sts fro m the artistic centers of power, and also marginal position of the poet, it also alluded to the
high lighted the invisibility of women. Critic Aida Toledo power of creation from within the horror. For the //
ha.s asked questions such as: where are the legs, where Festival of the Historic Center, in Poetry From the Bosom
is the woman who wore the shoes and walked to these (Poesla salida del pecho), the audience could use a pin
centers? The use of the red heels was initiated in to stick one of her nipples. Included in a photographic
Guatemala, in 1999, during the group show curated by composition of women's breasts. She also performed
th e PAl Group. Titled The Shadow (La sombra), the piece for forty-five minutes inside a city sewer in the Central
consisted of the burial of th e red shoes in a cement Park of Guatemala City, in what she calls a "poetic
platfmm approxima tely twelve by twelve feet. At the end performance" entitled, For the Surface (Para Ia superficie).
of the show, the artis t extracted the shoes, as a symbolic She entered the sewer with her typewriter, while rope s
act of liberation from soc ial constrai nts, and wrote the tied to a tree allowed her to send her poems, written
na m~ s of women she knew on the platform before it was amidst the filth , up to the surface of the street. For the To
destw1e d. The choice of this particular kind of shoe Live Here event in 2000, Diaz had herself enclosed for
connotes a voluntary limitation of free movement. This ninety minutes with 25,000 fly larvae in a transparent
references stereotypes of "sexy" clothing , and women's glass structure, out in public. The heat accelerated
acceptcmce in wearing co nstra ining attire demanded the life cycle of the larvae, and the flies started to
by male-domi nated taste . The Selia de Vico Gallery, hatch inside the box. The artist, dressed in white and
wh o ha s cons istently supported young artists and , blindfolded, stayed unmoved by the incessant circulation
in particular, performati ve works, presented Laguna s' of thousands of flies around her. The piece, ironically
insta llation/ performance ca lled Ownership Title (Titulo titled Ambrosia, intended to convey how the artist
de propiedad) in 1999. A set of handcuffs, engraved perceived life in Guatemala, an experience as
with the inscription "She of He," were hung on the wall unbearable as being covered in flies with no way to
wit! "" secu1i ty gumd watching ove1· them. During the escape. That same year, she placed herself naked in

211
 front of a large window of one of the historical buildings
in the city, in view of passers-by, while plucking the eyes
out of fish from a pail and putting them in a jar as a
reflection of the violence of her country. The allusions to
sexuality were explicit in a country dominated by
extremely conservative morals. The action also evoked
torture, the blinding of witnesses, and death. Other
works by the artist, who now lives in the United States,
examine migration and the experience of displacement.
Finally, Venice-award-winning Guatemalan artist, Anibal
Lopez (also known as A-1 53167) has also done extensive
action work in Guatemala City, both individually and
with Diego Britt. He has installed or modified traffic
signs, thus su bverting norms of communication, as
evidence of the general violence that the city suffers. He
has also prepared actions that relate to the virtual
occupation of space. Between 1999 and 2001, he
created Stain of 55,000 Dots (Mancha de 55.000
puntas), where a dot is printed in a daily newspaper
with a print run of 55,000. In Distance Between Two
Points (La distancia entre dos puntas), the backs of two
identical cars were covered with a white cloth
containing a large black dot in the middle. Both were
driven all around the city for hours, while documenting
the variable distances estab lished between the two
caused by normal driving in traffic. Point in Movement
(Punta en movimiento, 2000), is part of this series, as was
Line of 12,000 Dots (Linea de 12000 puntas, Monterrey,
Mexico, 2000), and 1265 KM, presented at th e Biennale
de La Habana , 1997. The artist managed to transmit the
physicality of a route that disappears while being
marked, the concept of the line dematerialized.
Two important works from 2000 must be mentioned. Th e
action 30'" of June (30 de junio), n organized by
Con texto,23 was selected by Harald Szeemann for the
2001 Venice Biennale and received one of the prizes
for a young artist. Late on the evening of June 29 1h, th e
artist threw a tru ck load of charcoal onto the avenue
where the army was to parade the following day. When
the police found the charcoal, equipment was brought to
clean it up, but the stain of the charcoal remained on
the pavement. The next day, the artist photographed the
army parading. The stain reminded everyone of the
Indian villages of the 1980s, burnt to devastation during
212
the worst period of the war. Contexto also supported a
controversial action performed that same year, The Loan
(f/ prestamo). Lopez walked down the street with a
loaded gun and held up the first man he encountered.
He asked him for his money and explained the action
was not a robbery, but a loan . Lopez told him that he
would be paid back by the awareness and knowledge
of art that his children would gain. With the money
taken (equivalent to about US $1 00), the artist had a
poster printed that described the action and paid for th e
expenses of the opening. This action provoked violen t
reactions even from the artistic community, and an
interesting debate has followed in relation to the limits
and ethics in art. 24 This is particularly interesting in
contexts where death and brutality have become part of
daily life and have therefore almost demanded to pu sh
• these limits to extremes25
Looking back to these years, it is impossible to dissociate
the Central American political and social context fro n
the developments of action work and performance that
started to articulate a discourse in the late 1990s. As we
have seen, for the most part this movement originated in
Guatemala . Many of the above-mentioned artists have
continued to develop their work in various directions.
Some, through their experiences participating in ma jor
international events, have enlarged their references and ]
engaged in works that transcend the local with out
forgetting it. They create works that could appl y t
marginal situations anywhere. They have also stronJ y
influenced the emergence of actions and performances in
other countries in the region. While this influence is . t
always of a thematic nature, it has allowed arti sts h,
consider this language as a powerful tool to create
awareness of the present situation in their countries .
J
 1would like to thank Monica Kupfer, art historian, writer, and cura tor, and one of the founders of the Bienal de Panama; Raul Quintan illa, artist,
curator and one of the fou nders of the Artefactoria group th at was active from 1992 on in Managua, editor of Artefacto until 2003, and
presen tly of Estragos art magazine; Rosina Cazali, curator and writer in Guatemala; Ileana Alvarado, curator and writer in San Jose; Juan Luis
Rodriguez, artist in San Jose; and others that have given some insight into research sources.
2 A wide and low archway in the San Felipe neighborhood in Panama City, it has since collapsed.

3 Ileana Alvarado, Juan Luis Rodriguez: El Combate (San Jose: Fundacion Museos del Banco Central, 1995), 22.
4 Con versa tion wi th the author, November, 2007.
5 Philippe Bouvard, "Un point nair et llaque de sang en vedette a Ia Biennale," Le Figaro (September 27-28, 1969). Cited in Alvarado, Ibid ., 42.
6 Informati on gathered from emails with Guatemalan curator Rosina Caza li.
7 Informati on from Monica Kupfer, Panama .
8 11 was included as a special presentation within the multi-venue event, Doubtful Strait (Estrecho Dudoso), organ izad by TEOR/ eTica, San Jose,
and curated by the author and Tamara Diaz in 2006.
9 1Like America and America Likes Me. Rene Block Gallery, New York, 197 4.
10 William Wa lker (1824-1860) was a filibuster from the slate of Tennessee. He participated in military actions aimed at obtaining control of
Cen tral American nations wi th the intent of annexing them to the United States. Th is act was an expression of the United Stales' belief in Manifest
Desti ny. Walker was president of Nicaragua from 1856-1857 unti l Costa Rica declared war against him in May 1857. Walker surrendered
and was executed in Honduras in 1860.
11 RAT is an acronym taken from the first names of the participating artists: Raul Quintanilla, Aparicio Arthola and Thais Fontenelle.
12 Emu il from Raul Quintanilla to the author, October 12, 2007.
13 Participating artists were Raquel Quesada, Thais Fonlenelle, Lu is Morales, Porlirio Garda, and Raul Qu intan illa Armijo.
14 In March 1988, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi troops, by air and by land, attacked this Kurdish city, located about260 kilometers from Baghdad and
near the Iranian border, with several types of chemical weapons. Over 5,000 of Halabja's inhabitants were massacred. Their wa te rs were
poisoned and health hazards were created for years to come.
15 The fi rst one of this series was called Make-Up Lesson (Lecci6n de Maquillaje), and it was presented at the Bienal de Sao Paulo in 1998 in a
project that was commissioned by the author, which included liheen artists from Cen tral America and the Caribbean. A publication is ava ilable,
entitled Central America and the Caribbean. a Story in Black and White .
16 Aida Toledo, Guatemalan scholar affil iated with the Un iversity of Alabama, has written extensively on this topic . See, lor example, "Con tornos
del mapa de las exclusiones: algunos observaciones sabre Ia escritura de mujeres guatemaltecas, " Pasos a desnivel. Mapa urbana de Ia
cultura contemporanea en Guatemala. Rosina Cazali , ed. (Guatemala: Ediciones La Curanderio, 2003), 34-37; "En el performance y Ia
instalacion: espacios imaginarios de artislas guotemaltecas," Espejos que dejan ver. Moria Elvi ra lriarte and El iona Ortega, eds. /sis
/n fernacional Review, No. 33 (Santiago de Chile, December 2002), 145-56; "Poesia, cuerpo y performance como verdaderas emergencias
esteli cas en Ia Guatemala de hoy," Temas Centrales (San Jose de Costa Rica : Teoretica-Th e Rockleller Foundation-GATE Foundation-Hivos,
200 1), 87-94 .
17 Sin pelos en Ia lengua, Plaza G&T, curated by Grupo PAl, Guatemala, 1999.
18 Ccutral Themes took place in May 2000 at the Nationa l Auditorium in San Jose, Costa Rica , organized by TEOR/ eTi ca with the collaboration
of The Gale Foundation, Netherlands, and sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation and HIVOS. The topic was 'Artistic practices and curatorial
possibilities in Central America, " and was moderated by Cuauhtemoc Medina. A comprehensive, bilingual publication is available.
19 C ated by Rosina Cazali and presented at the Museo lxchel , Guatemala, 2000.
20 This exhibition look place at the Zoo La Au rora, and several of the artists chose to develop th e them e of impri son ment.
21 A recent, very powerful work is Your tortillas, my love (Tus Tortillas, mi amor), a video of an action in which she prepared cornmeal, not by
grinding it traditionally but chewing on it, spitting it out to make the tortillas, and end ing the process by decorating them with her own blood.
22 T -2 30th of June is the anniversary of the Guatemalan army, one of the most feared in the worl d.
23 The Belia de Vico Gallery became "Contexto," and specialized in supporting actions in the public space, and is responsible br much of the
research of these artists .
24 his piece was included in Todo lncluido, o show curated by the author with Santiago Olm o, lor the Conde Duque Cultural Center in Madrid,
which traveled to the Contemporary Art and Design Museum in Costa Rica , in 2004; a catalogue is available. For furth er reading on th is topic,
sec Situaciones Artisticas Latinoamericanas I, published by TEOR/eTico in 2005.
25 For further reading on these aspects, refer to the author's essay in: Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art, Mauro Reilly and
Linda Nochlin, eds. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007).

213
 Marla Teresa Hincapie: Action, Corporeality, and the Realm of the Feminine in Colombia
Maria Iovino
In 1990, a performance work received a prize at an art
event in Colombia for the first time, thereby demonstrating
how recently this medium developed in the country.
Sim ilarly, the fact tha t the artist Maria Teresa Hincapie
rece ived the prize on thi s occasion (XXXIII Salon
Nacional de Artistas) points to her foundational role in
the development of performance art in Colombia and to
the recognition of her work as a peak in performance art
in Colombia.
A Thing is a Thing (Una coso es una coso ) was the piece
that became a landmark of thi s mom ent, which was
demonstrated by th e unan imity of the jury who judged
th e works, and by th e influence that th e work and the
artist had in severa l cou ntries th erea fter. Thi s work is one
of the best examples of the exploration of the fem inine
!hat characterized th e period in which it was pi'Oduced,
and it introduced a number of variants not previously
addressed in performance art in Latin America. Th e
control over her body and th e concentration the artist
exhibited during her performance complemented the
complex symbolism that Hincapie structured.
Hincapie assem bl ed a large orthogona l spi ral in the
ga llery over the course of two hours, through a constant
re·sign ifico.ion of modest malerials. Hundreds of ob jects
fro m a humble household were used to assemb le A
Thin g is a Thing. Hincapie pul led these objects out of a
travel bag in a ceremon ial, si len t, and slow manner, one
by one . The artist lined up kitchen utensi ls, cleaning
supplies, make-up, table linens, bed sheets, kitchen cloths,
clothes, food, and other everyday domestic ob jects .
Along with her strong and austere figure, this constituted
the primary presence of the action, which progressively
revealed a reorganiz ing principle, the idea of infinity,
and of an endless, craft-like, and profoundly semantic
work . In the photocopied statement the arti st presented to
the public as th e sole explanation of her work she wrote:
I alone. He alone. She alone. A lone space. A lone
corne r. A sing le line. Al l things are alone. We are
21 4
all alone. Everything packed . All in a box. All in a
suitcase. All in the purse . All in th e bags. All in
a corner. All in parts . All very near. A pile of rice .
A pile of sugar. A pi le of coffee . A pile of paper.
A pile of thing s.
Although Hincapie and other Colombian artists had
wo rked in the realm of th e feminin e, wi th action I
corporea lity, and an alternative gaze;' the issues of time
and movement as physical displacements becam e
more important in the mid-198 0s. Thi s led to further
questioning of the representational apparatus th at had
begun to be explored in various artistic terrai ns
beginning in the 1960s .
The Colombia n art world was clearly influen ced by
the various crises caused and aggravated by the
assassination of the popu lar leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan
in 1948 and by th e extreme social contradictions tha t
provoked them. Th e first signs of urban coll apse
manifested in Latin America and Colombia as well. This
altered state of affairs was aggravated by an increased
violence taking place in Colombia beginning in 198 2,
the year th e Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonil la,
was assassinated. This hi storic event marked the
beginning of the most violent warfare betwee1: the
drug cartels and the government. The se con fl icts led to
widespread homicidal activity that claimed, among
numerous victims, several presidential can didr:ites,
judges, political representatives from all parts of l e
country, journalists, wi tnesses or presumed witn esses, as
well as more than 3,000 left-wing par ty mem bers or
suspected sympathizers. The violence in cities ro se to the
most un precedented levels in the world and killi ng
orga ni zations emerged in the poor suburbs and rura l
commun ities. Th e material, moral, and em ofiona i
co llapse was foll owed by an in crease in kidn appi ngs
and a proliferation of guerrilla and param ilitary groups.
Thi s crisis has produced a climate in which the words
"life" and "death " are repeated incessan tly and are
M~riil Trrr.si\ Hincapie. VitrinA (Shnp Window). Bogota. Colombia. 1989

I
\
-~
Maria Teresa Hincapie, Una Cosa es una Cosa (A Thing is a Thing). Bogota, Colombia, 1990
charged with meaning and yet with indifference. Maria
Teresa Hincapie was the first artist to consider life to be
an artistic proposal. She therefore inserted her body into
her art practice in order to create a space, irrespective
of gender issues, for the mu lti dimensionality of the
feminine form. Hincapie began by recognizing herself,
both macro and microscopically, as a being and as part
of a huge ecological system. Thi s view countered any
theoretical premise and led her to ree ncounter the sacred
and the eternal. The artist's argument was life, in its
widest sense. She progressively eliminated representation
from her work and understood it as an obstacle to
understanding reality.
Before Hincapie, Maria Evelia Marmolejo, an artist from
Cali, produced the first feminist performance piece in
Colombia in 1981 . It consisted of two actions: one at the
Galeria San Diego in Bogota and the other at the
Salones Atenas, organized by Eduardo Serrano at the
Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogota. Marmolejo's actions,
6
]
]
]
clearly influenced by the expressionist lines of Body art,
focused on the topic of the woman as a life-giving body.
For these actions, she medically induced her own 1
menstruation, taking advantage of the dripping it
produced as if she were writing on the floor. Sh e
performed and wa lked around naked . A sim ilo.,
landmark piece from the same period was performed in
1984 by the Antioquia artist Maria Teresa Cano, who
produced a life-sized model of her own body in
chocolate . On the day of the opening at th e Sal' n
Atenas, she invited the public to eat and di gest the
chocolate body. However, these two actions re M i.
circumscribed within the limitations of a feminin e th eme.
Three works from Maria Teresa Hincapie's early career
explicate her idea of the infinite, the lowly, an d her
surroundings: If This Were the Principle of the In finite
(Si esto fuera un principia del infinito, 1987), Paucities
(Parquedades , 1987) created with Jose Aleja ndro
Restrepo, and Vanishing Point (Punta de fuga , 1989).

•· ·
Th ese works were inspired by the dialogue the artist
shared at the end of the 1980s with fellow artists Alvaro
Restre po, Doris Salcedo, and Jose Aleiandro Restrepo,
wi +L whom she had worked closely at the beginning of
he1 ::areer as a performance artist. With these artists,
ar,cl through a reading of Joseph Beuys that emerged
fro .1 their contact, Hincapie became acquainted with
performance art.
Hincopie shifted from the world of theater to that of
vi sual culture, thereby providing a new orientation and
greater autonomy for her perspective. He1· successful,
d code-long career as an actress ended in 1984 with
th e famous monologue Ondina written expressly for her
by Juan Monsalve, director of the theater group Acto
Latino, wi th whom the actress had extensively toured in
Colom bia and various countries in Europe and the East.
Ondina embodied many of the influences that Hincapie
wa assimilating into her work during her mature
pt- . iod, including the teachings of Jerzy Grotowsky,?. the
.....
'
experimental use of the body and the stage, as well as
the Japanese "No" theater.3
In Ondina, a long monologue about the feminin e, the
artist moved from the representational to an eve1·more
pure expression of being. In the words of the author,
Juan Monsalve:
Ondina is a labyrinth of sparkles in which
woman struggles, loves, is delirious, searches, and
understands. A woman, who, like a soul, sea, and
womb, like a mother, a lover, a daughter, and sister,
asks about herself, 'Why is she not alone with me,
deep woman, deeper than the abyss that the sources
of thepast hang on to. The closer I get to you, the
more you plunge into the depths of preexistence.' 4
It is thus natural that the works created after her
performance of Ondina- Paucities, If this Were a
Principle of the Infinite, and Vanishing Point-we1·e
217
 ]

Marfa Teresa Hincapie. Vitrina (Shop Window). Bogota. Colombia. 1989

218
dominated by the idea of slowing time and how the
slowness of time relates to the feminine. These
interpreta tions concluded in 1991 with a meditation on
maternity in Stretching of Love (Estiramiento de amor),
whi ch is also Hincapie's clearest expression of
perma nence and continuity; much like the ecological
pri nc iples of life that govern her artistic vision.
In the video installation Paucities, the artist is shown
sitting on a park bench, waiting, putting on lipstick, and
opening and closing a handbag on her lap . At the same
time, uni nteresting images of the artist were broadcast to
TV sets placed on the floor of the gallery. In If this Were
a Principle of the Infinite, Hincapie slowly wa lked
around the stage of Bogota's abandoned Teatro Cuba
for two days, in twelve hour increments, whi le carrying
a set of personal objects, thereby creating a map of her
everyday life. For Vanishing Point, the artist again uses
th e th e Museo de Arte de Ia Universidad Nacional de
Colombia (Bogota) as a setting . In slow motion, the artist
presents actions that take up time during an ordinary
day of a common woman, such as sweeping, cooking,
organ izing, ironing, and pacing back and forth. These
elements reappear, albeit in a different form , in A Thing
is a Thing . For this work, the artist places symbolic
emphasis on concepts of infinity, th e line, the cycle
th roug h the continuous making and unmaking of a sp iral .
Hi n apie dealt with the urban environment in Shop
Window (Vitrina, 1990), a piece that occurred in a space
for displaying commercial merchandise. She combin ed
the f. nctions of a woman clean ing a public place (who
re, ,.r ins ignored by passers-by because of her work) with
th o.. e of a woman who attracts and flirts with passer·s-by.
For six hours, the artist cleaned the shop window with
soap, a task she would interrupt in order to put on lipstick
and leave a kiss mark on the cl ear surface. Aher cleaning
again, she would trace the outline of her body on the
glass, emphasizing its sexual parts in order to later
integrate her own body into the drawing. Naturally, a few
mi nutes aher the action began, the reactions of people
pa si ng by on foot or in buses and cars related to thi s
simple change in , or non-violent break with, linearity.
From 1992 onward, Hincap ir 's work shifted toward s a
search for the sacred, th e strictest levels of experience,
and a non-representation of the personal . In the
exhibition, Ante America, curated by Carolina Ponce de
Le6n at Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogota, th e
artist decided to incorporate herself into the exhibit by
sleeping for three nights in a row in the main, open-air
courtyard of the venue (a colonial house) . This was also
in preparation for a work she later presented entitled
This Earth Is My Body (Esta tierra es mi cuerpo).
Her work acquired a new meaning when she presented
You Are Holy (Tu eres santo) at the Museo de Arte
Moderno in Bogota, where she remained for six days,
silently meditating and fasting in a confined space she
surrounded with lit candles. During the hours when th e
public visited the museum , she sat at a desk placed at
one end of the courtyard, surrounded by con centric
circles of grass. On the desk she placed the readings for
that day (all on the topic of the sacred), and answered
in writing the question s she rece ived (in writing) from
those interested in her work.
You Are Holy led to Towards the Sacred (Hacia lo
sagrado, 1995), an intense piece of research and
pilgrimage that involved wa lks through sacred sites and
natural landscapes of Colombia. This action lasted for
several years and was the basis for Divine Proportion
(Divino proporcion, 1996), a work that won another
prize at the XXXVI Salon Nacional de Artistas. In an
atmosphere of complete austerity, the artist assu med a
powerful presence in front of the viewers . She walk ed
barefoot, in an eerily sl ow motion, from one end to th e
other of a vast industrial space where the eve nt took
place. With her master-y of the body, she called atl ntion
to the co ntrad ictions between speed and necess ity,
pragmatism and life, and between the sacred and th at
wh ich violates it. It also focused on the value of livi ng
beings in th e universe they inhabit. In a parallel fashion
th e grass she planted in the cracks and gaps of the
fl oor suggests how the life-cycle, in a rando m way,
superi mposes itself upon th e artificial.
Explorations similar to th ose performed by Hincapie
(between the hybrid form of performance and
contemporary dance) may also be seen in the work of
Alvaro Restrepo, who founded the Colegio del Cuerpo
in Cnrtogena in 1997. Restrepo emp loyed thi s strot eo y
not simply as an educationa l and artistic project, bu t
719
 also as an attempt to recover the meaning of ecology
and the sacred. He reacted to the confusion and
alienation fostered by the contemporary Colombian
condition by emphasizing the individual as a member of
a highly complex system. Restrepo explained, "In a
country such as Colombia, plunged into a bloody crisis
of values, the human body has lost its sacred dimension:
we see it mutilated, tortured and assassinated every
day." Amado Tinoco, a gifted student in the school he
directed, served as an example :
A beautiful, black thirteen-year old girl. At first,
she was Amado ["beloved"] simply named, as her
father was assassinated and her mother
disappeared. She lives with her grandmother, like
the million and a half displaced peop le now
suffering in Colombia. Through dance, Amado
recovered the meaning of life that Colombia
had robbed her of, as the miracle of human
existence in a nation where bodies are stabbed,
assassinated, and where massacres kill bodies en
masse, denying them the possibility of an intimate
and decent death s
The international interpretation of Colombian art has
been restrictively related to images of catastrophe. This
perception denies the existence of a deeply articulated
discourse because of the difficult circumstances in which
it developed. However, art in Colombia has responded
to the crisis of modernity, and th e significance of life.
Artists such as Doris Salcedo, Oscar Munoz, Maria
Teresa Hincapie, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Miguel Angel
Rojas, Beatriz Gonzalez, and Rolf Abderhalden, among
others, surpass the limits of the political and illuminate
the vital contradictions that drive and give meaning to
existence. The artistic interpretations of these artists can
be understood from the depths of memory and the
eternal return, which discursive representations are
unable to address.
Witnesses of the Ruins (Testigo de las ruinas) is one of the
most we ll known works by Mapa Teatro group (created
by Heidi, Elizabeth, and Rolf Abderhalden). It made the
interpretive force evident in Colomb ian performance.
This performance is comprised of the collective efforts of
a community, deemed pr·oblematic and unsolvab le, to
220
rescue its memory and meaning in the midst of a forced
displacement. In the same way, Witnesses of the Ruins
shifts the interpretive and expressive focus toward th e
experience of marg inality. Rather than constructing an
argument, Mapa Teatro aims to give a heartfelt face
and voice to a community that remained veiled by
diverse social, political, and governmental narratives
that were imposed .
This work was born from the research behind the project
Cundua, A Pact for Life (Cundua, Un pacta par Ia
vida, 2000-2003).6 During that time and with the hel p
of the City Government of Bogota through its Observatorio
urbana (Urban Observatory) program, Mapa Teatro
affected the recovery of public spaces. The main purpose
of Mapa Teatro's work was to encourage reflection on
found problems . They focused on squatter communities in
the northeastern hills of Bogota, especially Barrio Sa nta
lnes, where Calle del Cartucho became famous for its
ungovernable situation. For Mapa Teatro, Calle del
Cartucho was not simply one of the most ta lked about
urban myths, it was also a familiar reference becau se i!
was located in close proximity to the School of Fine Arts,
where Rolf Abderhalden teaches.
At the time, Calle del Cartucho was crowded with
migrants from the countryside who were fleeing hunger
or violence and looking for work . It was also home to
trash recyclers, shopkeepers, street vendors, prostitutes,
single men, and families who arrived after the 1948
revolt that followed the assassination of Gaitan . As
Abderhalden states
Because of that exceptional circumstance, Ca lle
del Cartucho became a strategic point in the ci ty
for all kinds of illegal and legal busin ess
transactions, but also for the development of th e
most clever activities of the informal economy Th e
dramatic events it witnessed earned it the J
nickname Centro del temor (Center of Fear).?
Naturally this area became the logical targ et of a J
program whose goal was urban recovery. The city faced
problems that demanded perhaps the most arbitrary of J
all solutions: to level the place in order to build the
Parque Ter·cer Milenio (Park of the Thir·d Milleni urn ), u
J
Marfa Fernanda Cardoso in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Cardoso Flea Circus, Phi ladelphia, PA, US, 1997

221
 non-descript place that denies any memories of the space
upon which it was built, erasing all historical, mythical,
political, and human references associated with the site .
Mapa Teatro created several presentations to follow-up
on the project and the lives of those affected . They held
dedication ceremonies for the Eastern hills, thereby
completing the project, Cundua, A Pact for Life. s In
any event, the reflections, inquiries, follow-ups, and
reelaborations continued after 2003 , and led to the
video-performance Witnesses of the Ruins, which unites
the voices that this multi-year event involved. In Witnesses
of the Ruins, as in Cundua, memory becomes a web
created from material and intangible objects, which,
gives meaning and value to a human community.
This work explains through palpable metaphors how,
if meaning has been lost, one arrives at a state where
problems reoccur and are constantly aggravated ,
weighing upon and freezing an entire society, and more
specifically, the group that society punishes with invisibility.
Th e piece lucid ly probes the great human stage with
vo ices from disaster, from daily struggles and illusions,
and from the ambition, joy, and grief experienced by
different people, to make clear that in reality, each person
is a protagonist, regardless of their role in political or
economic decision-making. The performance involved
the last inhabitant of Calle del Cartucho, a woman who
prepared arepas and hot chocolate on a small portable
burner. She wor·ked there until the last possible day,
thereby recal ling the pul se of everyday life that has si nce
disappeared from Cartucho. At the end of the performance,
like a sign of vital resistance, the woman let out a
powerful laugh before an image of the street's ruins .
Mapa Teatro has been a unique organization in the art
of Colombia. Since its foundation in 1984 Mapa Teatro
has based its work on a wide investigative practice that
addresses con temporary problems and artistic reflections
in the same way as hi storic creations. The interpretation
of traditional literary and theatrical references like the
myth of Prometheus in the case of C'undua and Witness
of the Ruins represents one of their most frequent
methodologies. Rolf Abderhalden chose Heiner Muller's
version of the myth in which, when Prometheus learns of
his libemtion, he regrets the separation fwm the eagle
222
that devours his liver every day, and he fears he will not
be able to survive with out it. The director of Ma pa
Teatro explains, "In this turning point of the fable it
generates the core of fear of history: Prometeo has more
fear of liberty than the bird ." Abderhalden adds, "The
text worked as a ready-made would: a found object that
is removed from its context to be interpreted and re-
signified through a multiplicity of readings, of gazes,
and gestures. As the text was read, each one reinvented
his or her own tale, reenacting the original text and
rewriting his or her own myth ."s
Witnesses of the Ruins stands as a crucial example of
performance art in Colombia and as a reflection on Latin
American reality, its process of construction/ destruction , J
and the reappropriation of memory that has been the
foundation of its cities. Great filmmakers, playwrights, )
and visual artists from the continent have extracted a
single thread from this knot of encounters and mi shaps
that explains the complex web of dismemory and rad ical
disorientation that inevitably ends in violence.
I
Finally, among the most outstanding Colombian performance
pieces, we should mention The Flea Circus (EI circa de
pulgas, 1994-2000) by Maria Fernanda Cardoso is a
unique work, despite its foundation in an old tradition.
Cardoso came from the field of sculpture, which gives
her work qualities and orientations that are ra dical ly
different. Despite the con notions of vitality, the ephemeral, )
or transitory nature of its workings, The Flea Circus also
involves a corporeal aspect not present in Abderhalden 's
and Hincapie's pieces. l
Hincapie, Abderhalden, and Cardoso share their penchant
for the microscopic and the concrete as well as a desire to
l
destabilize the notion of unique centers. They share an
allusion to a contemporary Colombian context. In the
)
case of The Flea Circus this allusion is understood in
relation to previous works in which the artist worked with
taxidermied animals and other materials to tackle themes
of identity and conflict in Colombia. As the artist states:
J
I was interested in things being real and perhaps
that's how I arrived at animals ... The end of the J
eighties and beginning of the nineties witnessed
the most intense moments of drug-related terro rism
 in Colombia . It was the era of Pablo Escobar, of
th e bombs in the DAS building and in the Centro
Comercial in Calle 93 , which among other events,
were very real and very painful. Part of my
reaction of exhibiting real animals had to do with
being unable to negate or ignore reality. 9
The Flea Circus, like the aforementioned works and
artists, are found between referential works that embody
a history of performance art in Colombia . Today the
genre includes collectives like Helena Producciones
(Helena Productions) whose initiative, in conjunction
with the artist Wilson Diaz, began the Festival
lnternacional de Performance in the city of Cali in 1998.

The rupture with the centralist discourses were prod uced by Debora Ara ngo, Feliza Bursztyn, Doris Salcedo, Beatriz Gonzalez, Alejandro
Obregon, and the performances by Jonier Marin and Rosemberg Sandoval. Although these artists and others carried out important works and
significant performances, we have focu sed th is short text on the considerable contri butions and tragically brief career of Maria Teresa Hincapie
(1954-2008).
2 Editor's note: Grotowsky was a Polish theater director, best known for his work in avant·garde productions and the development of "poor theater, "
which sought to facilitate a closer interaction between the actor and audience by stripping away costumes, sets, lighting , etc.
3 "N " (or "Noh") is a form of Japanese theater that has been performed since the fourteenth century and combines drama, dance, music, and poetry.
In this tradition, performers are individually trained, but never rehearse as a group before performing, thereby encouraging spontaneous interaction
b"tween the players. Noh greatly influenced subsequent Japanese dramatic forms like Kabuki and Butoh .
4 Fragment of the second presentation of Ondina at the International Theater Festival in Manizales, 1985.
5 Consuela Pabon, Aetas de fabulacion, Investigaciones sabre arte contemporaneo (Bogota: Proyecto Pentagono, Ministerio de Cultura, 2000): 7.
6 In Arawa k, c 'undua means the place where one goes to die.
7 A term used by the playwright Heiner Muller when referring to the expressive knot that keeps the ten sion in a play Rol f Abderhalden uses it
here to explain the situation in re lation to the work.
8 Rolf Abderhalden. Forthcoming in the review of ASAB, Escuela de Aries de Bogota.
9 Maria Fernanda Cardoso in an interview with Diego Garzon, Otras voces, otro arte (Bogota: Ediciones Planeta, 2005): 160-161.

223
 Prefacio y agradecimientos
Julian Zugazagoitia, Director, El Museo del Barrio, New York
El Museo del Barrio se honra en presentar una publicacion unica y sin precedentes
Arte :1: Vida. Acciones par artistas de las Americas, 7960-2000. Este material
historico fue compilado apartir de una investigacion llevada acabo para realizar Ia
exposicion del mismo titu lo presentada en nuestra institucion del 31 de enero al1 8
de mayo de 2008. El volumen se concentra en las contribuciones en el area del
performance por artistas de las Americas, incluyendo a los Iatinos de los Estados
Unidos, Puerto Rico, Ia Republica Dominicana, Cuba, Mexico, Centro y Sudamerica,
asf como creadores de estas regiones que viajan y viven en distintos lugares del
mundo. Teniendo como objetivo establecer una cronologfa de obras clave, esta
publicacion comienza asuplir Ia falta de informacionde tanimportante tendencia de
Ia produccion artfstica caribena y latinoamericana. Con ella, vemos como estos
artistas prefiguran, se conecta n y difieren de Ia historia oficial del arte del
performance. Este estudio se enfoca particularmente en las contribuciones historicas
de los artistas Iatinos a este campo en Ia historia del arte.
Con Arte :1: Vida arranca Ia celebracion de los 40 anos de El Museo y una muy
esperada renovacion de nuestras instalaciones. Asf como El Museo crece gracias
a un equilibria entre nuestra comunidad fundadora, El Barrio, y Ia Milia de Museos
de Ia Quinta Aven ida, este proyecto celebra y honra a nuestro director fundador,
Raphael Montanez Ortiz, cuyas acciones vanguardistas fueron reconocidas dentro
de Ia vanguardia artfstica internacional mucho antes de que inaugurara El Museo
del Barrio en 1969. Asimismo, las acciones aquf presentadas hacen eco de dos
preocupaciones gemelas de Montanez Ortiz lo local y lo global Aunque son
particularmente importantes para nosotros, creemos que tambien lo son para el
mundo del arte en general Debemos, sin embargo, admitir que nos enorgullecemos
del papel fundamental que nucstra base de operaciones, Nueva York, ha jugado
en esta historia numerosos artistas viajaron a La Gran Manzana para crear obras,
mientras que muchos otros han sido apoyados de manera especial por instituciones
hermanas tales como Americas Society (antiguamente Center for Inter American
Relations), Franklin Furnace, Exit Arty Hemispheric Institute for Performance and
Politics de New York University, cuyos esfuerzos nos hemos esmerado en destacar.
Asurniendo de lleno Ia rnisi6n de El Museo y el espfritu experimental de sus
fundadores, esta rnuestra panorarnica es una respu esta vital de nuestra
institucion a un pC1blico creciente y al aurnento de estudios especia lizados sabre
el terna. Ubicado justa en el centro de este dinamico dialogo, El Museo se
esfuerza por contribuir a Ia investigacion original en el area del arte Iatino,
caribeiio y latinoamericano. Baja Ia diligente curadurfa y direcci6n intelectual de
Ia Ora . Deborah Cullen. Directora de Programas Curatoriales de El Museo del
Barrio. Arte ;t Vida fue generado como continuidad de una investigaci6n llevada
a cabo al presen tarse en El Museo una version especial de Ia muestra itinerante
No Ia !lames performance IDon't Cal! It Performance. 2004), curada par Paco
Barragan y Deborah Cullen. Para llenar el vacfo que se constato durante esa
investigacion in icial, este material y Ia exposicion para lela nos ofrecen una
emocionante y desafiante mirada sabre acciones de artistas conocidos y otros
menos conocidos. ounque hay muchos mas que podrfan haber sido incl uidus. Con
este esfuerzo esperamos mas que nada inspirar estudios futuros enluga re~ donde
Ia exploracion apenas ha comenzado.
En nombre de Ia Junta Direct iva y del personal de El Museo del Barrio, me gustaria
agradecer en particular a Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, que generosamente
otorg6 el prestigioso Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award en 2006 a Deborah
Cullen. Este premia proporciono Ia ayuda necesa ria para Ia fase inicial de
desarrollo de un proyecto de esta magnitud Sin su inmediata y generosa
respuesta, este proyecto no podrfa haber sido ll evado acabo. Asirnisrno, El Museo
tiene una deuda de gratitud con Ia larga e Intimarelacion con Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust, que apoya nuestros proyectos y adqlllsiciones contemporaneos de
vanguardia Estos patrocinadores inmediatamente respondieron al desaffo de
26
trabajar con nosotros en este proyecto. Agradecemos a New York State Council on
the Arts y New York City Department of Cultural Affairs que han apoyando las
exposiciones regula res de El Museo.
AI desarrol lar un proyecto tan multifacetico como este, hemos tenido Ia buena
fortuna de contar con el apoyo y Ia colaborac ion de muchos individuos y
organizaciones En primer Iugar, nos gustarfa agradecer alos artistas. Ya sea como
individuos o como colectivos, elias son los creadores de Ia poderosa expresi6n
que nos ha inspirado para emprender este proyecto. Particularmente, queremos
reconocer a quienes estan incluidos en Arte ;t Vida. Muchos de elias no s61o
prestaron su obra de rnanera voluntaria, sino que tambien nos proporcionaron
informacion contextual. asf como contactos y sugerencias sabre otros artistas y
estudiosos. Fueron nuestros primeros y mejores aliados Adal, con el Rev. Pedro
Pietri; Rossana Ago is, Wiley Ludena, Hugo Salazar del Alcazar &Armando Williams
Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, Guillermo Kexel; Carlos Altamirano; Francis Alys:
Asco; Arte Calle; Diego Barboza; Artur Barrio; Oscar Bony; Border Art Workshop 1
Taller de Arte Fronterizo; Jacobo Borges; Tania Bruguera; Maris Bustamante; Nao
Bustamante; CADA; Miguel-Angel Cardenas; Marfa Fernanda Cardoso; Graciela
Carnevale; Lygia Clark; Colectivo Sociedad Civil; Papa Colo; Eduardo Costa; Arturo
Cuenca; Cyclona; Jaime Davidovich; Ange l Delgado; Eugenio Dittborn; Juan
Downey; Jorge Eielson; Felipe Ehrenberg; Diamela Eltit; Marco Antonio Ettedgui;
The Fabulous Nobodies; Eduardo Favario; Liliana Felipe &Jesusa Rodriguez; Rafael
Ferrer; Teo Freytes; Coco Fusco; Regina Jose Galindo; Fernando Garcia; Guillermo
G6rnez-Peiia; Felix Gonzalez-Torres; GRAV; Alberto Greco; Victor Grippo; Grupo
Chaclacayo; Grupo Provisional; Marfa Teresa Hincapie; Alfredo Jaar; Roberto
Jacoby; Yeni y Nan; Kenneth Kemble; KMAN; Tony Labat; David Lamelils; Carlos
Leppe; Silva no Lora; Richard A Lou; Juan Loyola; Leopolda Maier; Antonio Manuel;
Liliana Maresca; Teresa Margolies; Daniel Joseph Martinez; Oscar Masott ; Alonso
Mateo; Cildo Meireles; Ana Mendieta; Maldito Menendez; Freddie Mercado
Velasquez; Marta Minujfn; Raphael MontanezOrtiz; Charlotte Moorman con Claudio
Perna; NADA; No Grupo; Glexis Novoa con Grupo Cfvico; Helio Oiticica; Clemente
Pad in; Lyg ia Pape; Rolando Peiia; Polvo de Gallina Negra; Proceso Pentagono; Geo
Ripley; Ritual Art-De, incluyendo Juan-Sf Gonzalez; Carlos Rodriguez Cardenas;
Lotty Rosenfe ld; Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock &David Avalos; Santiago Sierra;
Antoni eta Sosa; Leandro Soto; El Techo de Ia Ballena; Elena Tejada-Herrera; Pedro
Teran; Tndos Estrellas/AII Stars; Cesar Trasobares; Carmclita Tropican?; Teresa
Trujillo; Tucuman Arde; Tunga; Nicolas Garcia Ur1buru; Eugen ia Varga<;; Ejgardo
Antonio Vi go; Eduardo Vi IIanes; Alfred Wenemosor; CJrlos Zerpa; y RaC1 ~ L' nita.
Los trabaJOS histuricos aquf reunidos han debido presentarse a tr .. 0s de
documentaci6n. principalmente en fotografia o tomas de video. Muchos fntrM afos
y cineastas generosamente documentaron las acciones de otros artistas,
proporcionando una ventana virtual que ha dado acceso a su creatividad y
permitido recordarla Agradecemos tambien aestos artistas, entre loscuales estan
Rodolfo Alcaraz. Lourdes Almeyda. Adrian Arias, Peter Barker, Rene 8Prtholo,
~, i anu c l Boluarte, Carlos "Bora", Will Brown. Cesar Carnei ro, 1
\ rmando Castillo,
Christa Courie, Nicolas Delgado. Rufino de Mingo, Juan Downey, James Elliot,
Jose E Figuaroa. Fuerza Aerea de Chile, Harry Gamboa, Jr, Eduardo Gi:. Daniel
Gonzalez. Juan Gonzalez Loyola, Luis Alphonsus Guirnaraes. Paula Heredia,
Alejandro Kuropatwa, Dona Ann McAdams, Susan Meiselas, Carlos ~1i l i tello,
Daisy Mora, Ana Vitori a Mussy, Billy Name, Lorie Novak, Alfredo Nunez. Fernando
Paes, Foto Carlos, Ana Pulido Bartlett, Jose Luis Ramirez. Lula Rodngues\' Wilton
Montenegro, Jorge Roiger, Dagoberto Roque, Ross Rudesch Harley, Montserrat
Santamaria, Marta Sentis, Doris Spencer de Barboza, Taller Pedro Teran, Ruben
Valencia, Julio Vengoechea, Santiago Yanes y Sergio Zeva llos,
En particular agradecemos Ia colaboraci6n y apoyo de nuestro director ,unclador,
Raphael Montanez Ortiz, y de su esposa Monique Arndt-Ortiz En ~!·Je"a York,
 ·as instituciones hermanas generosamente pusieron anuestra disposicion sus
~:~~rsos. En Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, agradecemos a las
si uientes personas DranaTaylor, Drre:tor, Jri i,Lane, Deputy Drrector, Marcral
G;doy-Anativia, Assocrate Dr rector, M.arleneRamrrez-Cancro, Assrstant Dr rector of
Arts & Media, y Mila Aponte Gonzalez, Vrdeo Archrve Curator. En el Franklrn
F rnace Archive, a Martha Wilson, Foundmg Drrector, Mrchael Katchen, Senror
A~chivist yHarley Spiller, Administrator. En Exit Art, reconocemos Ia colaboracion
d~ Jeanette lngberman, Co-Founder y Director, y Audrey Christensen, Director of
Archives and New Medra
Tenemos un21 deuda de gratitud con los individuos y organizaciones que prestaron
sus obras durante Ia exposicion yautorizaron el usa de sus imagenes. Ademas, nos
gustarfa reconocer alas muchas personas que nos ayudaron alocalizar oseleccionar
obras En muchas casas fueron las mismas personas y son fam iliares, colegas -
con frecuencia a cargo de Ia documentaci6n, herederos o representantes de los
artistas. Este proyecto no habrfa sido posible sin esta colaboracion internacional.
En Nueva York, apreciamos Ia generosidad de Carolyn Alexander, Director, y Amy
Levin, Co-Directory Registrar, Alexander and Bonin; Isabela Villanueva, Assistant
Curator, Americas Society; The Juan Downey Foundation; Christo y Jean-Claude;
Bellatrix Hubert Partner/Director and Amy Davila, Marketing Director, David
Zwirner; the Estate of Ana Mendieta; Michelle Reyes, Director, The Felix Gonzalez-
Torres Foundation; Mary Sabbatino, Director, Wade Miller, Registrar, y Stephanie
Joson, Arch: Jist. Galerie Lelong; John G. Hanhardt; Vanessa Critchell, Director,
Luhring Augustine Gallery; Michele Maccarone, Director, Ellen Langan y Jasmin
Tfou, Maccarone Gallery; Valerie Smith, Chief Curator, e Hitomi Iwasaki, Associate
Curator, O uee~s Museum of Art; Carla Stellweg; Marcia Acita, Assistant Director
yTom Ecc les, Executive Director, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial
Studies, Bard College; John Perreault; y Sarvia Jasso, Assistant Directory Yasmine
Dubois, Sales Assistant, The Project
En otros lugares de los Estados Unidos, el proyecto tambien tuvo el rn ismo apoyo
En Ia cercana Filadelfia agradecemos a Janet Samuel, Registrar, y Aaron lgler,
Media Consultat. The Fabric Workshop and Museum. Mas al sur, en Miami,
recibimos con entusiasmo todo el apoyo e informacion que vino generosamente
de parte de Glexis Novoa Debemos no tar aqui tambien el carina especial de nuestro
Curador El· . F~entes pares e material vlas muchas horas que dedico a las obras
de artistas , ubanos y cuba no-america nos. Agradecemos tam bien a Adalberto
Delgado y, · ~met Paparelli; Jose A Figueroa y Cristina Vives; Juan-Sf Gonzalez y
Carlos PerrLVida l; Art Kendall man; Helen Kohen, Vasari Project Archives y Denise
Delgado, C'.l tor, Art Services ami Exhibitions, Miami-Dade Public Library System;
Rafael Sa! 1 or; y Cesar Trasobares En Ia costa oeste, en California, estamos en
deuda con ChonNoriega, Directory Michael R Stone, Manuscripts Processor/Film
and Video Project Manager, The Fire of Life; The Robert Legorreta- Cyclona
Collectio~. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library and Archive, Gall ery
Paule Angl ·11, San Francisco y Michael Schnorr y el Border Al1 Workshop.
Me gustar'~. t1n1bien rcconoccr el aporte de Gabriela Rangel, Directora de Artes
Visuales, /1 : .~ · ; c as Soci ety, qui en nos ofrecici sugerencias incisivas e informadas
durante el dPsarrollo del proyecto, sirviendo como consultora yconseJera, gracias
asu propiu inieres en los materiales. En particular, debemos felicitarla par guiar
Ia selecci cin venezolana, junto con Sagrario Berti, que llev6 a cabo Ia primera
investigaci(in para El rvluseo sabre Venezuela y personalrnente trajo algunos
invaluablesmateriales hasta nuestraspuertas. Javier Tellez nos ofreci6contactos
YMarguerite Mayhall compartiola informacion de su tesis doctoral con nosotros.
Agradecernos por sus prestamos a Doris Spencer, de Doris Spencer de Barboza
Collection, Berenice y Marcos Etted~ui, Dan iel Gonzalez, Juan Gonzalez Loyola,
FundacionMuseos Nacionales- Museo de ArteContemporaneo, Caracas, Ignacio
YValentin3Oberto y The Perna Foundation
Par Ia ubicacion y seleccion de obras de artistas argentinas queremos agradecer
a Ana Longoni, profesora de Ia Universidad de Buenos Aires, lnvestigadora del
Consejo Nacional de lnvestigacion de Argenti na, especialista en el tema, que
generosamente ayudo y dio comentarios sabre las obras. Oueremos tambien
expresar nuestro aprecio a Ia curadora e investigadora independiente, Victoria
Noorthoorn, que compartio sin reservas su propia investigacion original sabre el
tema, en tributo a su solidaridad de muchos anos con el trabajo de El Museo. En
particular, Victoria estudio y selecciono piezas representativas de Ia vasta e
importante produccion de Marta Minujfn, con quien trabajo de manera cercana. Su
contribuci6n fue decisiva para este proyecto. Tambien agradecemos a Carol a Bony,
los herederos de Oscar Bony y MALBA-Fundacion Costantini, Lourdes Castro y los
Archivos KWY, Portugal; Fernando Davis; Nidia Olmos de Grippo y the Estate of
Victor Grippo; Trinidad, Ana e Ignacio Fombella; Ana Marfa Gualtieri de Ia
Fundacion Centro de Artes Visuales de La Plata y Centro Experimental Vigo;
Eduardo Gil; Van ina Greco; Luz y Mauro Herlitzka; Marla Jose Herrera y Mariana
Marchesi; Valerie Hillings; Julieta Kemble y Adriana Pedrosa; Julio Le Pare, Eli
Jimenez Le Pare, y Estrellita Brodsky; Jorge Lopez Anaya; Susana Lijtmaer; Cecilia
Molina, Praxis International Art, Buenos Aires; Patricia Rizzo; Montserrat
Santamaria; Estela Totah, Director, Dellnfinito Arte; Almendra Vilela; y Cecily
Marcus.
En Brasil, recibimos Ia ayuda de muchos profesionales Ante todo, reconocemos
a nuestra amiga y colega, Claudia Calirman, curadora y estudiosa independiente
y autora del libra Brazilian Art Under the Dictatorship (Duke University Press) de
proxima aparici6n, qui en estuvo a nuestra disposicion durante todo el proyecto y
nos ayudo a discernir Ia complejidad de varias obras importantes Reconocemos
tambien a nuestro amigo, Antonio Manuel y a su esposa Marisa, que fueron mas
alia del deber ayudandonos no solo con su propio trabajo, sino tarn bien con el de
otros. Agradecemos asu galeria, Nara Roesler, muy especial mente a Nara Roesler
y Marli Matsumoto, Oirectoras. En Ia Associa~ao Cultural "0 Mundo de Lygia
Clark," Sao Paulo, trabajamos en conJunto con Alvaro y Alessandra Clark, y el
curador Felipe Scovino, en Ia seleccion final Apreciamos Ia generosidad de
Cezinha Oiticica del ProJeto Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, y estamos en deuda
con Ia entusiasta colaboraci6n del cineasta y artista Ivan Cardoso. En el ProJeto
Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro, Paula Pape y Jose Mario Brandao respondieron a
nuestras peticiones Gracias tambi en a Fernando Cesar Sant'Anna y Bianca
Per egrini, que fueron responsables de Ia notable participaci6n de Tunga
La presentaci6n de Chile y el proyecto en general se beneficiaron de
las perspectivas iluminadoras y el companerismo de Robert Neustadt, profesor
de Northern Arizona University Ademas, Marilys Belt de Downey, una antigua
y constante amiga de El rvl useo del Barrio, generosamente compartio sus
recuerdos, comentarios y rnateriales Agradecernos tambien a Justo Pastor
Mellado, teorico de arte y Alfredo Barrios Fernandez, asistente de Carlos Leppe.
En Bogota, Maria Iovino, curadora e investigadora independiente, nos ofrecio
una vi sion intel igente, en particular de Ia obra de Marfa Teresa Hincapie
(1956-2008). cuya breve pero espectacular trayectoria nos ha tocado a todos
Agradecemos con afecto a Catalina Casas, Directora de Galerfa Casas Ri egner,
asi como Camila Barrera, Manuel Angel y Juan Gallo, Director de Galerla
Alcuadrado, Bogota. Del Per[r recibimos un torrente de nueva informacion
Agradecemos a los investigadores y curadores emergentes, en particular a
Sharon Lerner Rizo-Patron y Jorge Villacorta Chavez, ambos profesores de Ia
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Lima, y tambien a Emilio Tarazona,
Miguel Lopez, Max Hernandez Calvo y Jose Ignacio Padilla. Agradecemos
a nuestro colega, curador e investigador Gustavo Buntinx; Martha Canfield y
al Centro Studi Jorge Eielson para Ia Difusi6n de Ia Cultura Hispanoamericana
de Milan; asl como a los artistas Sergio Zevallos en Berlin y Rocfo "Chio" Flores
en Nueva York par su gran entrega.
En el Caribe tambien encontramos muchos colaboradores serviciales. En Puerto curadurfa sabre las regiones geograficas en generaL Me gustaria reconocer las
Rico, figuras clave nos ofrecieron materiales, incluyendo Elaine Delgado, Directora generosas contnbuc10nes mtelectuales de Ana Longon1, Argentma; ClaudiaCaiirman
de Artes Plasticas dellnstituto de Cultura Puertorriquena y Ia fotografa Daisy Brasil; Gabriela Rangel, Venezuela; Maris Bustamante, Mexico; Sharon Lerner Rizo:
Mora. En Ia Republica Dominicana, agradecemos a Sayuri Guzman, artista y Patron yJorge Villacorta Chavez, Peru; Robert Neustadst, Chile; Elvis Fuentes, Cuba·
curadora independiente, asf como aOuisqueya Lora yAlberto Lara, de IaFundacion Sayuri Guzman, Republica Dominicana; Virginia Perez-Rattan, Centroamerica· y
Taller Publico Silvana Lora. Los amigos de siempre y artistas muy especiales Marfa Iovino, Colombi a. Una bibliograffa completa y un fndice anotado de r'os
Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Scherezade e IIiana Emilia Garcia facilitaron nuestra tarea. artistas aumenta Ia utilidad de este volumen.
En Ia investigacion sabreartistas mexicanos, MarisBustamante, artista y Directora
del Centro de Artes, Humanidades y Ciencias Transdisciplinarias, Mexico OJ, nos Estamos seguros que disfrutaran de este proyecto y que aprenderan de el tanto
proporcion6 imagenes, contactos y sus amables consejos Asimismo, Galerfa Nina como nosotros. Par cada tres o cuatro nornbres reconocidos, presentamos otros
Menocal, Mexico OJ; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Heidi Grivas, Registrar, cien. Yesto es solo el comienzo denuestro aporte al tema.
Lisson Gallery, Londres; Fernando Llanos/se Feliz consume VIDEO; y Victor Munoz
nos facil itaron materiales. Nuestro colega el artista Pablo Helguera fue tambien
unafuente de informacion, inspiracion ycontactos. Aprendimos mucho de nuestra
querida colega en Costa Rica, Virginia Perez-Rattan, Directora-Fu ndadora de
TEOR;eTica, San Jose, sabre el elusivo pero dinamico ambiente del arte de accion
en Centroamerica. Para Ia representaci 6n de Ia escena emergente de performance
en Guatemala, agradecemos Ia ayuda de Ida Pisani, Directora, y Cristina Rota,
ambas de Prorneteo Gallery, Milan.
J
Otros colegas nosofrecieron ayuda yconsejos en general de much as maneras y les
quedamos muy agradecidos Aqui nos gustarfa recordar en particu lar a Gilbert
Vicario, quien respondio a much as llamadas telefonicas ycorreos electronicos con ]
entusiasmo desde ese vasto recurso que es Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Ademas
agradecemos a Miriam Basilio, Carlos Basualdo y Sergio Bessa, compaiieros en el
alan de trabajo sabre arte Iatino y latinoamericano clcsarro llandose hoy dfa. l
La Junta Directiva y yo nos complacernos en reconocer en especial a Deborah
Cullen, Ia Curadora y Editora de todo el proyecto, asf como al todo el equipo d
curadurfa que trabajaron incansablemente para hacer este esfuerzo una realidad.
Un proyecto tan complejo y amplio involucra a todo el personal, y queremos
agradecer las acertadas contribuciones de Elvis Fuentes, Curador; Rebeca Noriega-
Casias, Coordinadora de Proyectos Especiales; Elizabeth Borne, Asistente de
l
Curadurfa; Noel Valentin, Registrador; Melisa Lujan, Asistente del Registrador; y
Trinidad Fombella, Coordinadora de Gerencia de Ia Coleccion Todo proyecto que
vale Ia pena es el resultado de Ia accion conjunta de muchas personas que l
coordinanlos asuntos institucionales. La Junta Directiva yyo agradecemos a to do
el personal de El Museo del Barrio en todos sus departamentns, en particular, a
Helena Vidal, Directora de Educaci6n; Lil i Santiago Silva, Gerente del Teatro;
]
Gonzalo Casals, Coordinaclor de Prog rarnas PLiblicos, Julio Marrero, Director de
Operaciones; Susan Delvalle, Directora de Asuntos Externos; Matthew Bregman,
Director de Desarrollo; Peter Ryan, Director deFinanzas; e Iiana Stallman, Gerente J
de Ia Tienda del Museo. Muchos practicantes de los programas de postgrado y
licenciatura tam bien ayudaron al desarrollo de Ia investigaci6n para Arte ;e Vida
y nos hemos beneficiado de sus nuevas perspectivas intelectuales. Entre elias J
estan Arden Decker, Natal ie Dupechcr, Joanna Grourke, Marisa Le1 er y Andrea
Ortlll1o. Tambien agradecemos a nuestra fluida traductora, Odile Cisneros, que ha
trabajado connosotros a Ia largo de var;osanos; nuestra editora de vid o, Ia artista
Claudia Joskowicz; y nuestro sensible fotografo, Jason Mandella La belleza y
claridad de esta publicacion sc deben a Ia atencion de nuestra maravillosa
diseiiadora gratica de muchos aiios, Elvira Moran.

Esta publicacion ofrece al principia una cronologia cornpleta para contemplar y

maravillarse. Panoramas reg ionales en detalle, bilingUes y profusamente
ilustrados, escritos por autoridades en el area pero con una perspectiva joven nos
permiten entender los contextos y trayectorias del tertii campo del performance
en cada una de las diez reg iones que se incluyen aquf. l:stos autores no solo nos
ofrecen textos fundarnenta les, sino que tambien fungieron como conseJeros de
 Arte -1- Vida: lntroducci6n al proyecto
Deborah Cullen, Directora de Proyectos Curatonales, El Museo del Barno, New York
Eta ublicacion presenta un panorama d~ las acciones p~rformaticas creadas par
s. fas de las Americas a Ia largo de las ultrmas cuatro decadas del srglo XX. Con
:~;: esfuerzo, El Museo del Barrio se propane combatir una ca_rencia fundamental ·
Ia falta de informacion drs~omb l e sob~e el arte de aCCion, una rmportante
·a de IaproduCCion artrstrca canbena, latma y latmoamencana. Los artrstas
ten dencl
i incluidos son rara vez mencrona· dos en Ias h.rstonas· que exrsten
· so bre eI
aq~ormance, las cuales por lo general enfatizan solamente Ia produccion de
~~istas europeos, norteamerica~os y algun que otro sud_americano y asiatica. La
d umentacian fotogratica o en vrdeo, escntos, objetos efrmeros y otros matenales
o;diante los cuales se presentan las acciones seleccionadas, ofreceran apenas
rmagenes fugaces y de baja resolucion, vistazos parciales de Ia que ocurri6 en _un
tiempo y espacio reales en todo el planeta Sm haber podrdo asrstrr a elias, solo
nos queda imaginarnos Ia plemtud, profundrdad e rmpacto emoc10nal que tuvreron
en su momenta Aun con tales limitaciones, esta antologfa propane mirar a un
tipo de creaci6n que ha srdo pasada par alto.
Las acciones son eventos interactivos que tienen Iugar en Ia calle y en otros
espacios publicos, en museos, galerias o lugares privados. General mente emplean
partes del currpo del artista ode un substituto de este en relaci6n di~ecta (en vivo
0
no) con una audienc ra que puede ser o no conscrente de su func10n receptora.
Difieren de Ia presentaciones teatrales narrativas a gran escala -que separan
alos artistas de los espectadores-, de Ia danza, las lecturas de poesia, los
espectaculos circenses, las actividades de arte folcl6rico y las acciones politicas
sin intenci on artfstica explicita, aunque en muchos casas comparte raices y
estrategias con todas estas manifestaciones. Las acciones en las que esta
publicacion se enfoca son aetas intencionales montados por artistas con una rica
trayectoria de practica performatica o que han llevado a cabo eventos clave tan
importantes como para volverse referenciales en su contexto.
El performance utiliza muchas tecnicas y algunos historiadores importantes,
incluyendo aRose Lee Goldberg, tienden a ser flexibles y abiertos en Ia definicion de
este genera interdisciplinario. 1 En Ia cultura occidental, las acciones performaticas
par artistas suryieron a principios del siglo XX. con las actividades de los dadaistas
en el Cabaret Voltaire, fundado en Zurich en 1916. Podria decirse que las
inteiVenci one ~ en vivo de artistas latinoamericanos - o cle sus precursores no
occidentales- '1an tenido Iugar desde Ia epoca prccolombina. incluyendo rituales
tribales y ce: ,·~raciones cultura les o Ia exhibici6n misma cle sus cuerpos baJO
condiciones cnioniales. Sin embargo, en Ia seguncla mitacl del siglo veintc, el artede
performance v I·L acciones de arte pasaron a ser cUiniclas cle manera mas estricta
como una co::tinuidad cle las artes vi suales normalmente relacionacla con Ia
vanguardia y '1 practica conceptual.
Muchas de l'ls obras que se estudian aqui tienen contenidos y contextos sutil o
abiertamentc pQJiticos Durante estas cuatro decadas en que el performance
floreci6, los ra ises latinoamericanos y caribenos sufrieron. casi sin interrupci6n,
dictaduras rn :litares, guerras civiles. desapariciones, invasiones, brutalida d.
censura, vi c:aciones a los clerecho s humanos, problemas Je inmigraci6n.
expansion dwnogratica, discriminaci6n y dificultades econ6micas En efecto, a
veces estas bras se refieren a sus circunstancias, a contextos y puntas de
referencia ec.r ecificos Pero mas alia de esta generalizaci6n, no puede decirse que
haya muchos puntas en comun - con Ia excepci6n cle Ia identidad de sus
creadores- que justifiquen separar las acciones de artistas latinoamericanos de
las creadas por artistas de cualquier otro grupo cultural. Las obras son diversas en
terminos de contenido y aproximac i6n; son conmovedoras o provocadoras,
humoristicas natleticas, formales u oniricas.
El titulo de e:,tPproyecto, Artc :f:: Vida desafia el Iugar comun de que el arte es
equrvalente~ !n vida y que Ia vida es art e. Lo que se pro pone a traves de estas las
.
obras aquf reunidas es que, si bien el arte afirma y celebra Ia vida con una fuerza
regeneradora (as i como afina y provoca nuestro senti do critical, las acciones que
tratan de Ia desigualdad y el conflicto no son equivalentes aIa vida real que se vive
bajo Ia represion.
La frase de que el arte es vida se puede rastrear hasta un eslogan favorito deVladimir
Tatlin, artista ruso que lider6 elmovimiento de vanguardia en los afios veinte. Con
el tiempo se ha convertido en un cliche que cubre temas tan amp lias como el arte
japones de Ia posguerra yciertos desarrollos en el arte norteamericano de Ia segunda
mitad del siglo XX El artista aleman Wolf Vostell. quien fue uno de los primeros
organizadores de Happenings y trabajo de cerca con el grupo Fluxus, ha dicho que
"EI arte es equivalents a Ia vida - Ia vida es equivalents al arte." Otro aleman,
Joseph Beuys, formul6 sus conceptos teoricos basicos acerca de Ia funci6n social,
cultural ypolitica del arte. Deudor de escritores romanticos como Navalis y Friedrich
Schiller, Beuys estaba motivado par una fe ut6pica en el poder de Ia creatividad
humana universal y crefa en el potencial del arte para traer consigo cambios
revolucionarios. Beuys idealiz6 ymitifico el papel del arte ydel artista. Esto se tradujo
en su formulaci6n del concepto de "Escultura social", en el cual la sociedad entera
es vista como una gran obra de arte (Ia Gesamtkunstwerk de Richard Wagner) a Ia
que cada persona puede contribuir de manera creativa. Beuys proclam6 (haciendose
eco de Navalis) Ia celebre frase de "cada ser humano es un artista." 3
Robert Rauschenberg hizo notar ostensiblemente que le gustaria trabajar en "el
espacio entre el arte y Ia vida". Sin embargo, el compositor de vanguardia John
Cage, que tuvo una trayectori a de trabajo cercana a Rauschenberg, describi6 de
manera sucinta Ia distinci6n entre el arte y Ia vida, contrastando lo que designaba
como acciones "criticas" y "compositivas" durante Ia guerra de Vietnam.
Mi tendencia es pensar en estas actividades - de protesta y de marchas, de
objeciones y todas estas casas- como parte de acciones criticas en Iugar
de componer acciones en si mismas. Yo se que en mi caso y ciertamente
tambien en el suyo, no hay nada que el critico haya dicho que me haya
impedido componer. Ahara me parece que no vamos a parar Ia guerra con
una acci6n critica. o si logramos pararla, que sera sucedida por otra guerra,
etcetera. Me parece que senecesita hacer alga como una acci6n compositiva
en Iugar de una acci6n critica, para crear unmundo donde las casas a lasque
nos oponemos clara ycorrcctamente no IIeguen a verificarse.:
Esta idea ha sido exam in da incidental mente en otros lugares en Iahi storia de Ia
musicamode rna Greil Marcus ha esc rita sabre Ia tendencia a confundir el arte con
Ia vida en Ia musica popular. En su analisis del renacimiento norteamericano de
Ia mtrsica popular en los anos sesenta, que se basaba en los precursores de los
anos treinta, not6 que las acciones artfsticas durante esta epoca se vinculaban a
conceptos cle autenticidad Tambien percibio que las formas mas valoradas eran
el sufrimiento. Ia privaci6n y Ia exclusion. Segun Marcus, una clisoluci6n completa
del arte enla vida reconoce a los pobres como Ia forma de arte mas pura ya que
actuan sinmediaci6n y in reflexi6n, sin conciencia del capitalismo uotros factores
supra-determinantes. Marcus estudio el caso e Bob Dylan, quien luclraba con
esta misma cuesti6n y se quejaba de que Ia mayor parte del ptrblico confundia su
arte con una protesta o una acci6n politica, mezclanclo asi el objeto con el sujeto.
Marcus notaba que "cuando el arte se confunde con Ia vida. no es s61o el arte
que pierde. Cuando el arte es equivalents a Ia vida, no hay gente " ~
Arte :f:: Vida llama Ia atenci6n hacia esta borrosa frontera critica examinando un
buen grupo de acciones deliberadas e inventivas dentro de sus variados contextos
y cli scursos. La proclucci 6n local o lo largo clc los aiws decayu y florcci6 c11
respues ta a circunstancias politicas y socia les especificas, pero tambien en
dialogo con corrientes artisticas e internacionales. Once ensayos revisan corpus
 artrsticos significativos, aunque effmeros, desarrollados par artistas en Nueva York,
California y Puerto Rico, Argentina, Brasil, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Cuba y
Miami, Republica Dominicana, America Central - en particular Guatemala- y
Colombia. Los esfuerzos han aumentado con el tiempo en cada region en
dependencia del apoyo disponible ode circunstancias antag6nicas.
A principios de los anos sesenta, algunos precursores importantes, tales como el
grupo venezolano El Techo de Ia Ballena y el artista chilena radicado en Mexico
Alejandro Jodorowsky /leva ron acabo acciones inspirandose en los principios y el
espfritu experimental del Dadafsmo y el Surrealismo. Tambien durante este
perfodo, numerosos artistas, en particular argentinas, exploraron ideas sabre Ia
accion de sefialar o indicar. Uno de los pioneros clave, Alberto Greco, resalto el
mundo real y Ia vida cotidiana. Su propuesta era una especie de extension de Ia
filosoffa de Marcel Duchamp y dialogaba con figuras del Nouveau Realisme como
Yves Klein y Piero Manzoni Desde mecliados hasta finales de esta decada, varios
artistas en los Estados Unidos yen Argentina examinaron y teorizaron sabre los
procesos del Destructivismo En este perfodo de cambia social, lucha de clases,
conflictos urbanos, hue/gas, el inicio de Ia Guerra de Vietnam y las dictaduras
latinoamericanas, algunos creadores importantes como Ia argentina Marta Minujfn
y el director-fundador de El Museo, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, canalizaron las
fuerzas de Ia destruccion que percibieron a su alrededor, aprovechandolas como
parte de acciones creativas que ofrecfan un trampolfn para nuevas acercamientos
al arte, desprendidos de 6rdenes anticuados.
Desde mediados de los anos sesenta y en los setenta, los artistas neoconcretos
en Brasil rompieron las limitaciones del arte de otro modo. Manteniendo una
conexi6n con los principios de Ia abstracci6n geometrica desarrollada par artistas
concretos de Iageneraci6n anterior. Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica yotros comenzaron
a incorporar elementos organicos, expresivos e interactivos en sus obras. Los
neoconcretos estaban influidos par las teorfas de Ia fenomenologfa de Merleau-
Ponty Para reintroduc ir el arte en Ia esfera social. estos artistas abarcaron el
espacio bi- y tridimens ional, creando obras que requerfan Ia participaci6n del
espectador. Par otro /ado, a fines de los aiios sesenta, cuestiones candentes en el
ambito contemporaneo estirnularon Ia creaci6n de obras de activismo social y
polftico en Argentina y Venezuela. Con referencia eli recta y abierta a los males
socia les y politicos, acciones de artista~ y grupos como Tucurnan Arde o Jacobu
Borges se llevaron acaboa/ servicio de Ia revulucion oCllll esperanzas de canrbio
En1964, Marshall fVIcLuhan publico su obra fundamental, Cornprender los medias
de comunicacion (Understanding Media). acerca de los inmensos efectos
psicologicos, sociales yculturales de losmedias de cornunicacionmasiva McLuhan
hizo Ia importante observacion que no era el contenido expresado a traves de los
medias de cornunicaci6n sino los medias mismos los que afectaban Ia sociedad.
Siguiendo estas teorfas, artistas como Robe11o Jacoby y Eduardo Costa cornenzaron
ausar televis01es. radios ygrabadoras de cintas como sus medias. La presentacion
de tales esteticas no tradicionales ayud6 a di fundir el papel transformador de los
medias de cornunicaci6n en las relaciones interpersonales al tiempo que
proporcionaba a los artistas una nueva plataforma para redefinir las practicas
artfsticas contemporaneas usando el media como mensa1e.
Otra tendencia que emergir\ par esta misma epoca alrededor del mundo fue el
Happening Este terrnino. acuiiado en 1959 par el artista norteamericano Allan
Kaprow, describe una presentacion oevento que solo podrfa ocurrir una unica vez.
Fue adoptado par Rolando Pen a, Leopolda Maler yotros para describir una amplia
gam ade eventos a11fsticos en vivo, con frecuencia multidisciplinarios, espontaneos
o intcractivos. AIa largo de Ia clccada de los setentilmuchos otros a11istas uti limon
el media ambiente - en especial/a tierra- y el cuerpo llumano como referencias
significativas para hacer comentarios sabre Ia sociedad. Ia polftica. Ia violencia, el
30
genera oel arte mismo, asf como sabre Ia relaci6n entre el hombre y Ia naturaleza.
Entre elias vale destacar a Ana Mendieta, Juan Downey y Jorge Eielson.
Desde principios de esta decada, los artistas mexicanos y mexico-americanos se
convirtieron -literal yfigurativamente- en franqueadores de fronteras Evocando
ydesafiando Ia demarcaci6n y Ia existencia de barreras, artistas ygrupos como Asco
y Proceso Pentagono denunciaron las ramificaciones de Ia fronterizo en cuestiones
como Ia inmigraci6n, Ia identidad y Ia comunidad. A!raves de practicas conceptuales
acciones y performances, intervenciones e incluso teatro callejero, intentaba~
provocar cam bios en las instituciones de arte, asf como en Ia sociedad en generaL
Par otra parte, hacia finales de los setenta y principios de los ochenta, numerosos
artistas, en particular en Chile, utilizaron aproximaciones radicalesmultidisciplinarias
para tratar el tema de las atrocidades cometidas par las dictaduras militares en
Sudamerica. CADA. Lotty Rosenfe ld yAlfredo Jaar son solo unos cuantosdelos que
se incluyen. Otros. como los cubanos Glexis Novoa y Tony Labat, introdujoron el
humor como un mecanismo para comunicar sus mensajes con efectividad. Su
compromiso con cuestiones sociales ypolfticas, no impidi6 que sus obras desilfiaran
provocaran y subvirtieran las normas sociales mediante el usa de Ia comedia, 1~
parodia y Ia satira En esta epoca. artistas como el brasileho Tunga y Ia venezolana
Antoni eta Sosa. evocaban imagenes simbolicas ofantasticas, alegorfas ymitologfas
en contraste con las aproximaciones mas didacticas o abiertas de otros.
Los anos noventa se definen par una conciencia masmarcada de Ia diversidadcultural
yde las polfticas de identidad El ano 1992marc6 el Quinto Centenario de Ia owpaci6n
espano la de las Americas. Ia cual impuls6 a muchos artistas caribenos, Iatinos y
latinoamericanos acrear obras que correspondieran allegado de este trascendental
evento, as f como al fenomeno del multiculturalismo Entre elias estuvieron
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Coco Fusco yel Border Art Workshop(faller de Arte Fronterizo.
El dominicano Silvana Lora, Ia colombiana Marfa Teresa Hincapie y centroamericanos
como Ia guatemalteca Regina Jose Galindo tambien desarrollaron propuest ~ f~artes
a finales del siglo XX
Para no contemplar solamente los contextos especfficos. sino tambien el ~ n.·Jrama
perfomatico mas amplio. hemos incluido una cronologfa integrada par olr •s de
crucial importancia Esteesfucrzo i n ici ~l por sintetizar laodcsJrrollos tri ns!~~~. _,1ales
0igue el formato de Ia expusiciona p rtir de Iacual esta antologfa fue crea:l2. rn ella
las obrasse agruparon en orden cronologico aproximado ygenera/mente pl': t :mas
comunes en Iugar de por regiones geognifica:, Sin embargo. a[m haymud , '1::::Ja1o
de i nvesti~acion por hacer Cacla acci6n merece una narracion detallmiJ: 11 ·.has
artistas aun cleben de ser P.Stucliados en tesis doctorale~ o Iibras Fina llllL' I I~'.. esta
rica cronologfa - par Ia pronto separada de Ia historia mas amplia y globa! ,:, •arte
de Ia acci6n- debe ser integrarla. comparada. contrastada y examinada ' ' ··ode
esta. S61o entonces empezaremos a tener una vision mas camp/eta dol fe ( .,-eno
Roselee Goldberg. Pcrfrmnance Art. rmm Fulw is·n to 1/. ~ Ptcsenr (Londle'> fh. • ; dnd
f ludson Ltd. :.d,cion revicJr:;r, 7001). R·r·. ~P· (; ,: 1liT ' J •" · ' ' ..." .::·. ',)
' ;lc' ·1·t r::. 1950
(Londres: Thames an H!,,L,w Ltd. 1SJC)
Coco Fusco. "The Other History of Intercultural Perfor nance.'· Er]lish is Brc'~tJnl lr · ' :/ales
on Cullural Fusion in tin Americas (Nue'a York Nr.w PrP.S\ 19951.37-64.
3 DLntro de Ia mi ~ !T'J linea dr Beur. •m i!'lpo•t1ctc 1,;-toriadnr do :.rtP a!e: . •. Udo
Kulturmann. escribi6 en 1971 ellibro Arie hacia Ia vida. que resumia Ia decada ar.: ,.ior Y
proponia que los artistas eran shamans o curanderos. encargados de llevar Ia soc ie ~ad par
nuevas direcciones.
John Cagey Morton Feldman. Radio Happenings 1- V. 1966-1967(Colonia MusikTexte. 19Q 11 153.
Greil Marcus. Ilie Old. Wcinl ltmerica. The World of Bu!J Dylan's /Jascmenl Iii!''' ·1: 'u e·,a
York MacMillan. 2001). 78 29.
 Apuntando a/ Este, a/ Oeste y a/ Sur: Acciones en Nueva York, California yPuerto Rico
Deoorah Cullen
ayo analizanumerosas acciones llevadas acabo por artistas puertorriquenos
Este en~ajaron en Nueva York oen Ia Isla desde los anos sesenta hasta los noventa.
que:~n examina las contribuciones de artistas chicanos o mexicano-americanos
Tam ~aban activos en Ia misma epoca en Ia costa oeste de los Estados Unidos y
1
que ~~stas latinoamericanos que desarrollaron acciones de gran relevancia en el
1
de,a n particular en Nueva York, durante los anos sesenta y setenta. De esta
pals, ~a este textose enfoca en el panorama de las acciones performativas que no
m,~n~or~aron parte de un discurso artfstico mas amplio, sino que tambien fueron
~~s~os integralesen respuesta a preocupaciones especlficas de una comunidad.
El artista Raphael Montanez Orti~. fund ad or y primer director de El Museo del
rrio puede ser vista como un s1mbolo de los art1stas de performance lat1nos.
8
apecfficamente de los puertorriqueFios. Del mismo modo que en 1969 Montanez
~~iz se encontraba ante una encrucijada -par un Iado, las distintas cor~ientes e
influencias inte rnac10na~es y par el otro. su proyecto educat1vo en relac1on con Ia
omunidad puortorriquena en Nueva York-los art1stas latmos y latmoamencanos
~adicados en los Estados Unidos tambien se han encontrado atrapados historicamente
en una posicion paradojica. en Ia cual no son reconoc1dos omtegrados en el pano_rama
del "American Art". pero tampoco son acog1dos dentro del C1rcu1to art1st1co
latinoamericano Yen el caso -esporadico- de recibir atencion crftica occidental
-lease estadounidense o europea-la obra es rara vez interpretada en terminos
de su especificidad cultural o comunitaria. Esta diffcil situacion conduce
frecuentement(, aIa perdida de una mitad del significado de Ia obra.
Raphael Montanez Ortiz llevo a cabo sus primeras destrucciones de materiales
transformados ritualmente entre 1959 y 1961. En esa epoca. tambien escribio el
texto "Destructivismo Un Manifiesto" (1957-1962) 1 Procedente de una formacion
en el Expresionismo abstracto y en cine experimental -incluyendo tecnicas de
reciclaje- y con un vivo interes par Ia filosoffa. Ia psicologia y las culturas no-
occidentales cultivado durante sus estudios en Pratt Institute -que concluyo en
1964- Monta ~ez Ortiz cre6 Ia serie Hal/azgos arqueo/6gicos (Aichaeo/ogica/
Finds). entre 1961y 1967. La serie se basaba parcialmente en procesos rituales
que el artista habia empleado desde fina les de los anos cincuenta para rehacer
pelfculas -ya existentes- que cortaba con un hacha, melfa en una balsa de
medicina y lueno armaba en arden aleatorio Utilizando muehles domesticos, en
particular de s, ~ rop ia cas a, estos objetos de sacrificio -inti mos. desgastados y
auraticos del r"Prpo y del universo personal del Jrtista-- eran liberados de su
forma yfuncit\ a traves de un proceso pri vaclo que transformaba tanto a los
objetos como al artista. Sus restos aludian a una encrgfa erotica trascendcntal 'I
auna practicapositiva, creativa y regenerativa de Ia destrucci6n
En estas obras Montanez Ortiz e"ploraba Ia liberaci6n de represiones sociales,
el extasis, lo rn.istico y lo salvaje del cuerpo, en momentos en que afloraba un
interes par estos topicos estimul ado por nueva s formas de expresion libre
Asimismo, tantfJ el proceso como los restos que quedaban apunta banal continuo
dialogo del a1:'sto con los readv-mades de Marcel Ducllamp Como sei1al6 el
. artista dadaf<tc:: de Berlin. Ricllilrd Hueisenbeck. !a obra de MontanezOrtiz fue "Ia
opuesto del c-!_ · ~o L01Tipletado por Ia maquina" y, porlo tanto, dlvergente de Ia
practicaartistica Pop propuesta por Andy Warhol. Los Ha//azgos arqueo/6gicos
pueden ser v i ~t o s como un pa so adelante a Ia acci6n individual y gestual de
Robert Rauschenberg cuando en 1955 tomo Ia ropa de cama de su cuarto y Ia
integr6 al espacio pictoricoJ En este mismo ano -clave en Ia obra de
Rauschenberg- del otro Iado del mundo, en Japan, Shiraga Kazuo llev6 acabo
~onfrontaciones cone/ fango (Challenging Mud) y Murakami Saburo atraveso
b1ombos de papel rasgandolos en acciones que pretend fan expresar Ia angustia
post-atomic~ ;· ro mper con fronteras normativas prcvias Las dcstrucciones cle
c~mas, sofas, sillas y cojines de yoga realizadas por Montanez Ortiz pueden ser
VIstas dentro Jc esta tendencia artfstica .1
Montanez Ortiz fue incluido en el evento Simposio de Destrucci6n en e/ Arte
(Destruction in Art Symposium, DIAS). llevado a cabo en Londres en 1966. Allf
presento siete aetas publicos de destruccion, los que sol fa Ilamar Realizaciones de
destrucci6n ritual (Destruction Ritual Realizations) Fueron ejecutados entre 1965
y 1970 einvolucraron sillas, colchones, pianos, balsas de papel y su propio cuerpo.
En Londres, los performances de Montanez Ortiz fueron observados por un
paciente del psicoanalista Artur Janov y sirvieron como un catalizador de las
teorfas del "grito primitivo" (Primal Scream) de Janov. Sin duda, los Conciertos de
destrucci6n de pianos (Piano Destruction Concerts). filmados y televisados par Ia
BBC-TV, ABC yWNYC, influyeron en que Montanez Ortiz Iuera internacionalmente
conocido En 1968 el artista se present6 en vivo en el show de television de Johnny
Carson; yese mismo ano, organiz6 junto a Jean Tach un segundo DIASen Judson
Gallery de Nueva York, donde ya habfa participado en Ia serie 12 naches de
manipulaciones ( 12 Evenings of Manipulations) en octubre de 1967 .s Estas naches
estuvieron ligadas a los happenings desarrollados par Allan Kaprow y otros
artistas Muchas de las acciones se presentaron tambien en Judson Gallery e
incluyeron rituales de sangre, grabacion es de audio y sacrificios catarticos de
ratones o pol los, como La muerte de Ia gallina blanca y el centavo negro (The
Death of White Henny and Black Penny) La mayorfa de Ia prensa que cubri6 estos
eventos senalo los vfnculos entre el trabajo de estos artistas y Ia prolongada
Guerra de Vietnam, asf como otros sucesos tumultuosos de fi nales de los sesenta.
Bien pod ria decirse que Ia mayor y mas original contribuci6n de Montanez Ortiz al
arte aun estaba por llegar A principios de 1969, siendo maestro de High School
of Art and Design y ante Ia simple peticion del Board of Education de sugem
materiales educativos, el artista disen6 una sofisticada propuesta para un museo
nuevo, El Museo del Barrio, que deberfa servir a Ia poblaci6n puertorriquena y
latina de Nueva York. Con Ia creaci6n de El Museo ysu participacion activa en las
luchas locales de Ia ciudad, Montanez Ortiz anadi6 a su reconoc imiento
internacional el respeto de su comunidad, lo que le convirti6 en un artista de
extraordinaria significaci6n para Ia emergente escena Nuyorican 6 Apesar de esto,
Ia lectura de su obra, como Ia de otros muchos artistas, parece no admitir una
conciliaci6n entre su herencia artfstica internacional (en este caso Dada fsmo.
Fluxus y Accionismo vienes) y sus preocupaciones comunitarias Por ejemplo,
segC111 una interpretacion reciente de su conexi on cultural
Las cuestiones urbanas adqu ieren importancia cuando los hijos de Ia
primera ola de inmigrantes IIegan a Ia adultez. Co/chon (Mattress. 19641
de Rafael MontanezOrtiz. en el Museum of Modern Art. es un &Jemplo de
Ia abrupta incursion de esta generacion en elmundo del arte. La pieza
consiste en un col chon de resortes. preservaclo como objeto arqueol6gico
por media de un plastico lfquido que lo congela en su estado de
descomposicion Se parece a los colchones que se hallaban en los lotes
baldios de El Barrio. que acusaban. tanto enla tecnica como enla imagen,
Iapobrezade Ia comunidad latinaen esa epoca La obra de Ortiz reclamaba
un Iugar Iuera de Ia vision folkl6rica de Ia sociedad puertorriquena,
reflejando Ia experiencia de los pobresentoda Ia ciudad. Revelaba el poder
potencial de un objeto de desecho convertido como significante de una
experiencia historica y expuesto en Ia pared de un museo '
Aunque esta lectura ofrece un campo valido de alusionesa las que potencial mente
se refiere Ia obra de Montanez Ortiz, descarla su enfoque en el proceso rituali sta
de Ia creaci6n del objeto-colch6n. Asi, reduce el alcance de Ia propuesta y Ia
separa de las premisas te6ricas con las que el artista y sus colegas europeos y
asiaticos trabajaban. Por su parte, los numerosos catalogos sabre Fluxus, el
Dcstructivismo y cl performance rartl vez menci onan el importante papel ciD
Montanez Ortiz dentro de su comun idadB LSera que estas dos lecturas estan
condenadas a existir por separado?
 Los anos sesenta: !man (Magnet), Nueva York 9
Muchos artistas sudamericanos que visitaron Nueva York desde mediados hasta
finales de los anos sesenta trajeron perspectivas propias sabre Ia disoluci6n del
objeto de arte y su relaci6n con el proceso Par ejemplo, Julio Le Pare habia
exhibido en Nueva York ya en 1962 en una exposici6n de adquisiciones de pintura
y escultura en el Museum of Modern Art. Ese mismo ana, el grupo al cual
perteneci6, GRAV,1o present6/nestabilidad(!nstabilite) en un espacio de Madison
Avenue, The Contemporaries Gallery Aunque los objetos de Le Pare exploraban
efectos 6pticos y Ia relaci6n visual del espectador con el objeto, las obras de GRAV
eran ambientes laberfnticos en los cuales el espectador entraba. Los miembros de
GRAV experimentaron con Arte 6ptico, el usa de Ia luz artificial y los movimientos
mecanicos y unieron sus esfuerzos en actividades colectivas que consideraban al
hecho artfstico en terminos de una experiencia visual no-emocional. Explorabanel
plano de Ia percepci6n fisiol6gica, examinaban el movimiento y experimentaban
creando distintos tipos de intera cciones o situaciones entre el objeto de arte y el
espectador, estimulando su participaci6n. En 1964, En movimiento (On the Move)
fue presentada en Howard Wise Gallery Mas tarde, a principios de 1965, GRAV
present6 Laberinto 3 (Labyrinthe 3) en The Contemporaries Gallery AI mismo
tiempo. El ojo responsivo (The Responsive Eye) era inaugurada en el Museum of
Modern Art. Esta ultima exposici6n enfatizaba Ia tendencia internacional del Arte
6ptico que Le Pare yGRAV habfan estado clesarrollando porIa me nos desde 1960.
Un ana antes, en 1964, Ia exposici6n !man Nueva \'ark (Magnet New \'ark) en
Bonino Gall ery habia exhibido obras de veintiocho artistas latinoamericanos que
trabajaban en Ia ciudacl en esa epoca. Su presencia como grupo fue notabl e,
aunque producfan obras en diferentes corrientes esteticas. Otros artistas
latinoamericanos en esa epoca tambien estaban experimentando con formas
automatizadas omecanicas. Juan Downey vi no a Nueva York via Barcelona y Paris
en 1965. Una de sus primeras exposiciones en 1966 en Judson Gallery se centro
en maquinas interactivas. Un poco antes ese mismo aiio, Billy Kluver y Robert
Rauschenberg (fundadores de Experiments in Art and Technology, o EAT) habian
organizado Nueve naches. Teatro e lngenierfa (Nine Evenings Theatre and
Engineering). que tambien se enfocaba en tecnologfa y performance. Joaquin
Mercado Cardona, un influyente artista y diseiiaclor puertorriqueiio que estudi6 y
trabaj6 en Nueva York con importantes artistas y poetas. incluyendo a Taylor Mead
ySam Sl1ephm , colabor6 en el performancede Robert Rauschenbarg para Num L'
naches titu l ~clo Partitura abiertJ (Cpen. core) . unquc Downeysa destacaria mas
adelante en el area del video vel dibu1o. en su exposici6n Rob t contaminante
(Pollution Ro!Jot, 1970) en Hm·.'arrl Wist Galler\', se cscondi6 clentro de un tanque
c011 ruedas de ocho pies, el cualle perrnitia seguir a los asistc ntcs mirandolos a
traves cle un espeJO cle dos vi stas, y soplarles aire caliente Downey organiz6
hilppenings y performances. con frecuencia enfatizando el concepto de "energia
invisible" como fuerza vital que mueve nuestros cuerpos y mentes. usando
las tecnologias emergentes cle su epoca video. audio, proyecci6n de luces,
biorretroalimentaci6n y onclas cle radio. Tambien invent6 maquinas electr6nicas para
resaltar las intcrrelaciones entreel arte. Ia energia, AI pensamiento y Ia condicion
humana. Su vicleo-perfo1 mancc. P,'at6n alwra(Plato Nmv). realizado en el Everson
Museum of Art. en Syracuse. Nueva York. el 7 de enero de 1973. jugaba con Ia
relaci6n entre el espacio interior y el espacio publico. el antiguo simbolismo de las
sombras proyectadas sabre IJ pared de una cueva frente a los potenciales (o
continuos) desarrollos del video en el futuro
Prefigurando estos experimentos tempranos con Ia tecnologia, Marta Minujin
lleg6 en 1966 a Nueva York desde Buenos Aires, becada par Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation. Despues de presentarlo en Argentina, Minujfn instal6 El
BatAr:rJ7Den Biimr.hini Gi!llmy en febrero de 1966. unil piezil que permitla a los
espectadores atravesar unlaberinto de espejos de feria, resbalarse por una figura
de mujer y verse inundados par un enjambre de moscas JUSto detras de una barrera
232
de plexiglas Su MintJfono (Minuphone) de 1967, creado en colaboraci6n con Bell
Labs, desarrollo Ia idea de un bombardeo de los medias de comunicaci6n de Ia
pieza Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad, 1966 (creada en Buenos Aires). mientras
que su pieza de resistencia. Minuc6digo (Minucode ), realizada en el Center for
Inter-American Relations. en Nueva York, 1969, incluy6 cuatro eventos sociales
distintos filmados par varias camaras, cortados, editados y mostrados a todos los
asistentes en una sola proyecci6n. En esta pieza, los participantes "se volvlan
'reales y visibles' a sl mismos como si fueran actores en un ambiente social
los medias masivos de comunicaci6n en ese entonces promovlan 'ambientes' q~e
haclan posible una inmediatez y proximidad entre el observador y el observado."JJ
En 1963, Andy Warhol abri6 su primer taller Factory (La Fabrica) en el 231 East
47th Street Su circulo de ese periodo de mediados de los sesenta inclufa a
latinoamericanos como Marisol. Joaquin Mercado, Rolando Peiia y Marta Minujln,
quien en 198511ev6 acabo una foto-acci6n en Ia cual ceremoniosamentele ofreci6
aWarhol mazorcas de maiz para pagar Ia deuda e tern ade Argentina Unabanda
de rock-and-roll de hombres latinoamericanos - II amado The Bananas y que
inclula a Manuel Peiia, Rolando Peiia y Juan Downey- ha tenido vfnculos
intertextuales intrigantes con Ia iconografla warholiana. El happening con una
pelea de comida organizado par el artista venezolano Rolando Peria, conocido
como La Pae!la-Bicic!eta- Tota!idaci-Crucifixi6n (The Paella-Bicycle- Totality-Crucifixion,
1967). tuvo Iugar en Ia casa del artista cubano Waldo Dlaz Balart en East Hampton
yfue filmada par Warhol y ~u equipo En elmetraje, los nombres de Tht Bananas
eran pronunciados a gritos. aunque ellos no estaban muy visibles. Estc fraqmento
fue incluido en Ia pelicula de Andy Warhol ' ' (Cuatro estre!las/Four Star~~. 1967,
de 25 horas de duraci6n. En los crcditos aparecen The Bananas Tambien fu~ usado
en Los amores de Ondine (The Loves of Ondine, 1968) La idea de The Bananas
claramente fue una cooptaci6n del sfrnbolo fruto-como-macho usado par Warhol de
1964 en adelante en peliculas y camisetas, siendo Ia mas famosa una etiqueta
clespegable en Ia cubierta del album de The Velvet Undetground & Nico (1967).
El exuberante Peiia, fundador de aquella banda de rock imaginaria, Ia queorganiz6
con los nombres de sus colegas sudamerica nos en Nueva York, jugaba con el
simbolo pueril de Warhol reclamando el nornbre. aiiadiendo Ia emociri;, de Ia
sexualirlarlmasculina tropical y exr)tica Peiia lleg6 a Nueva York en 1~ 63 para
estucliar rlanza COil ~·!art h a Graham \ ;\1'.\ ill rl!l!.olai Despur;s a ~ i s ti lt J! !:ierce
CuPninnhan Dance S•ud in En 1966 pnicipn en c' sll!J'.\' ps i cocl ~ l icc J· 1 '1othy
Leary \' !\lien Ginsberg. IJ ilumin:Jc,tit, i/e!Buda(7he 1/lu:iilfJation of tl e i.' ~ Jha).
en SGCOilrl A\'81l1Je The at r~ r 1)11 r\IU C\il York lalllbien oryJniz6 cl F·'' The
Foundation ror tile Totality, que incluia a Bal art. Do\Jil8Y y Manuel ViL .'.::" ena,
entre otros. ·,· 1'111980. junto cl sus compalri otas Carlos Zerp21, D1cqn I.·:: ,ezy
Ruben Nu1iez. Pefia particip6 en el Annual Avant-Gatde Festival en Nur " ' York.
Per1a se hizo famoso por sus obras performativase instalaciones queewrra ~ los
significarlos y Ia retoriradel petr61en. A traves dehappenings callcJeros.: 1L IIev6
a cabo vi stiendo ropa negra y debiclo a su uso obsesivo del aceite de p.tr61eo
como media. Pena se gan6 el aporia de Pn nc1pr~ r~ e g 1 o
Otros visitantcs lali ll·J alllt.ri ca ltO~ t:ll i ~ Lif: vd Yur~. det!Sta epOCd tambienpz.·,i . :~lron
en eventos a gran escala. El artista frances Arman. quien !labia fundado ci ~rtist
Key Club, organizo junto con Ro e11 Fil!iouy Daniel Spoerri Ia Loterfa del La:·tl!ero
(Locker Lotteryj, un happening participativoen Grand Central Station deNueva York
en1965. En esta accicin, pidieron a varios artistas contribuir con objetosqueheron
luego colocados al azar en casilleros. Las !laves de estos se rifaron en cl Hotel
Chelsea y cada participante (artista o coleccionista) pudo sacar el contcnido del
casillero de su !lave. La acci6n en Grand Central Sta tion incluy6 obras do los
orgi!nizadores asi como de Ayo. Georqe Brecht. Christo, William Copelv, Allan
Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg. Dieter Roth, Niki de Saint PhalleyAndy
Warhol. Alberto Greco, qui en habia llegado a!Jueva York cle Buenos AiresJ fi,1ales
 participo en el evento con una accion titulada Rifa Vivo-Dito, justa antes otros artistas desmaterializaron el objeto de arte con un acercamiento post-
1964
~! su tr~gico suicidio el12 de octubre de 1965. 13 ________,minimalista con preocupaciones ecologicas. Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, qui en habfa
comenzado-creando-sus-fo/or-aciones-(-tvlvrcrtions)-en-1-968-en-el Gr-an-Blnal de
artistas argentinas, incluyendo a RobertoJacoby y Oscar Masotta de Buenos Venecia, realizo Nueva York verde. Proyecto intercontinental de ambientes
0 05 visitaron Nueva York un poco despues, en 1967. Durante su estadfa en Ia acuaticos (Green New York. Intercontinental Project of Waters Environment)
/
1
. rdea
sd, Jacoby asisti6 auneven to hippie II amado "Be-In" en Central Park el26 de en el East River en 1970, en con junto con una exposici6n en Bonino Gallery,
marzo, ' se puso una chaquet~ con Ias.lmagenes
C IU . . provoca do;as tanto de Mao como Antagonismo entre Naturaleza y Civilizaci6n (Antagonism Between Nature and
d Eva Peron y Ia 1nscr1pCIOn del t1tulo Un solo corazon (A Smgle Heart) El Civilization) Uti lizando un remo lcador con una docena de barriles de tinta, el
c~nceptual ista argentino Eduardo Costa, que habfa c~ laborado con Jacoby y artista tiii6 el rfo con el color mas cercano a Ia naturaleza para real iza r un
Masotta en Buenos Aires, en su v1s1taa Nueva York real1zo o?ras muy mteresantes. comentario sabre el precario estado de las vfas fl uviales del mundo y prate star
Trabaj6 con artistas de Ia vanguard1a neoyorquma en esa epoca para desarrollar contra el aumento de Ia contaminacion del agua La tinta era un flu ido verde
atro versiones de Obras ca!le;eras (Street Works) Estas mesperadas fluorescente inocuo, tal como el que Ia Marina de los Estados Unidos utiliza para
~utervenciones en sectores de Ia ciudad inclufan Obras de arte uti! (Useful Art rescatar a los astronautas que vuelven a Ia tierra.
'~arks) queCosta cre6 con Ia ayuda de Scott Burton, en Obras ca!lejerasI, llevada
acabo~I sabado 15 de marzo de 1969. Esta acci6n tuvo Iugar entre las calles 43 Entretanto, el artista puertorriqueiio Rafael Ferrer (que habfa vivido en Filadelfia
y52ydesde Ianvenida Madison hasta Ia Sext_a lncorpor6 proyectos de numerosos desde 1966) trajo Ia naturaleza a las galerfas de Nueva York con una accion
artistas.14 El performance de Costa se realizo entre las 230 a.m. y las 700 a.m. guerrillera que tuvo Iugar el 4de diciembre de 1968. Su Tres piezas de hojas (Three
Consisti6 en reemplazar letreros de metal de las calles, que habfa comprado Leaf Piece) involucra a sus estudiantes para llevar balsas llenas de hojas desde
Segun Ia declaracion original del artista Pennsylvania hasta Ia ciudad de Nueva York y, de manera clandestina, ll enar tres
de los espacios del galerista Leo Castelli.19 El feliz e inesperado acto surreal de
Las seiiales decfan E42 St, E51 St, E49 St, E45 St, E44 Sty W 51St, y Ferrer causo gran conmocion, ya que los visitantes llegaban a las galerfas y ten fan
podrfan ser ronsideradas una obra literaria discontfnua de 6 lfneas 15 que abrirse paso par entre Ia obra y dulces hojas. Los rumores sabre esta broma
que acaparo Ia atencion se difundieron rapidamente. lncluso Castelli mismo se
Ademas, Cost intento pintar Ia estaci6n de metro en Ia calle 42 y Ia Quinta intereso en Ia obra Ferrer observ6 que:
· Avenida en Ia lfnea de Flushing, aunque no pudo termina rl a. Esta obra puede
relacionarse a otra pieza, Recorte de wntexto realizacla para el Primer Ft:sti~ al Finalmente tambien supe que Leo dijo "son muy bellas" Aiios despues,
Argentino de Forrnas Contemporaneas (o Ia Antibienal), que tuvo Iugar en ely yo conversamos sabre Iaobra Afirma que las habfa dejado par esedfa
Cordoba, Argentina del15 al30 de octubre de 1966. Ahf, junto con Roberto Jacoby, y aiiadio "tal vez debf haberlas dejado mas tiempo ... ",u
Costa pinto "va;ios fragmentos de Ia ciudad de verde como una especie de texto
urbana anonimo."16 En 1969, Ferrer ll ev6 a Puerto Rico a su amigo y colega de Nueva York. Robert
Morris. para realizar un dfa de acciones que crearon escandalol 1Esto ocurri6 en
Elinteres de Co ta par el lenguaJe fragmentario de Ia ciudad se relaciona con otro Ia Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de MayagOez a principios de septiembre y
proyecto que llevo a cabo con John Perreault ese mismo aiio. Despues de Ia estuvo precedido por una exposicion de sus obras ecologisias de "dispersion"
investigaci6n Uteratura oral, en Ia cual ambos habfan colaborado en Buenos Aires, titulada FRARMRRIREEROFIBSEATERLR (Robert Morris, Rafael Ferrer}. durante
Costa yPerreault editaron Poemas en cinta( Tar1e Poems). para cuya primera edicion abril y mayo de 1969. Lucy Lippard describi6 los eventos asf
en 1969se irr•:!:,Pi6 una tirac!a cle 500 t!jemplares En l'sta obra busLaron subrayar
Iajiferencia ~ •r "ellenguaJe habiJ, o y el escrito por medioric Ia "publicacion" de La seccion de Ia muestra de Morris consistia er' esculturas y un dia (el 2 de
grabaciones rL l!has uditivas lt:;[das.· Costa, Perreault y Ana Weiner continuaron septiembre) deeventos no anunciados. entre eliasel transplante de un grupo
explorando lo<.::. 'intos tipos cln discursos contemporcinoos en lhP Fashion Show de arboles subtropicaiPs con unaexpectativa dP. vida de 25anos; una serie de
Poetry Event, L,q .nizado por el Center for lnter-AmeriLan Relations el1 4de enero de cascos mil ita res dispuestos en forma de circulo alrededor de una gran roca
1969.1nvitaron a otros artistas para crear traje. ydcscripciO'l sde los mismos usando (cuando un martillo de aire hacfa una grieta en Ia piedra, los cascos eran
ellenguajedeI.Jrublicidad " El propio Costa habfa tenido ur1a larga relacion con el retirados uno par u110 y se gritaban los nombres de los pafses de America
mundode Ia mn.ia. Entre 1966 y 198411ev6ll cabo cuatro Ficciones de moda(Fashion Latina); un evento que consi stio en arrojar piedras sistematicamente; una
Fictions), las CLn 1es consistfan en crear ccesorios de moda surrealistas. unicos en su acci6n en forma de danzacon gasolina en una carpa de lana; el acto de pintar
clase y hacerlcs fotograliar por celebres fotografos para luego promocionarlos en de color cafe los troncos de palrneras; una casi desastrosa combinacion de
revistasde al1a ccstura. La primera Ficci6n du mod& /(1966- i 968), inclu 6orejasde rnovimiento al azar-formal de 40 personas lle,·ando ntu1 chasyacompanadas
oro y fue cre2r!o en colaboraci6n C1 n Juan Risuelrl Fuc fotografiarla par Richard de dos docenas de bnmbas aereos laPzadas rnr Furrr Algunas de estas
Avedon, modG'cda por Mariano Schiano yf\llarisa Be1ensonypublica cia en Vogue en accione se relacionaban con ante · ior 11~ p ezas d.; pcrfc rn ~Jnce ,le l\1orris. ,
1968, con citas '.e Lawrence Alloway en los pies de foto. Mas adelante, usando lotos
de Hiro, se pufjiicaron en Ia portada de 1968 de Harper's Bazaar Ficci6n de moda II Estas obras revel an el dialogo activo y travieso de Ferrer con el arte dominante de los
(1974), un brazalete de una fila de horrnigas, fue fotografiado por Irving Penn para Estados Unidos, asf como el empeiio de crear oportunidades que favorecieran su
Vogue ymodelarla par Iman. Esta obra nunca fue publicada porque fue considerada propio trabaJO Sin embargo, Ferrer -al igual que Raphael Montanez Orti7- no era
demasiado agrbsiva Ficci6n de moda Ill, con rnariposas laminadas. fue fotografiada un marginal en este perfodo particip6 tarnbien en importantes exposiciones post-
par King ymod !ada por Shari Belafonte; se publico en Vogue en1982. Finalrnente, minimalistas como Anti-llusi6n. Procedimrentos/Materiales(Anti-11/usion. Procedures/
Ficci6n de moda /V(1983-84) fue fotografiada por Scavullo para Harper's Bazaar Materials, en Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969); Esta en tu cabeza. Cuando
fil Artiturl devirne Forma (Live In Your Head When Attitudes Become Form, Works-
~unque los r.xpcrimentos opticos laberfnticos, la s peleas de comida y las Concepts-Processes-Situations-Information, en Bern Kunsthalle, 1969); e Informacion
llltervencionc; ·nnceptualcs de Ia calle eron un extrerno del espectro ofrecido, (Information, en Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970)
Los setenta: Costa este, costa oeste y Ia Isla
La historiadora de arte Rosalind Krauss ha II amado "performance de tarea" acierto
tipo de obras de artistas post-minimalistas, incluyendo Sa!picadura(Splashing), de
Richard Serra. Encuentra sus origenes en Marcel Duchamp, a quien llama el
investigador original de "los procedimientos del hacer". En este tipo de trabajo,
senala, "uno comparte el tiempo real de Ia concentracion del escultor en su tarea
y uno tiene Ia sensacion que durante ese tiempo, el cuerpo del artista es esa
tarea."2J La lectura de Krauss que establece un linaje desde Duchamp hasta los
anos setenta fue confirmada par una de las obras performativas mas poderosas
de Ferrer A principios de los anos setenta, Ferrer realizo Fuente desviada para
Marcel Duchamp (Deflected Fountain for Marcel Duchamp), en Ia fuente exterior
del Philadelphia Museum of Art IPMA). El proyecto fue creado para una exposicion
en Ia cual las obras pretend ian celebrar Ia relacion de Duchamp con Ia ciudad, asi
como las piezas de este artista en Ia coleccion del PMA Ferrer eligio ubicar su
pieza en Ia fuente afuera, que podia ser vista atraves de una ventana que estaba
detras de Ia obra de Duchamp, Gran Vidrio (Large Glass), es decir, entraba en el
campo de vision del Gran Vidrio. El proyecto de Ferrer consistia en utilizar su propio
cuerpo para fisicamente desviar el chorro de agua en un periodo de tiempo fijo,
dos veces par semana, mientras durase Ia exposicion Ferrer ha escrito sabre como
estableci6 un horario inflexible para llevar a cabo el trabajo y organiz6 a sus
estudiantes para que asistieran en su Iugar cuando el no podia ir?4 Esta
!area/performance form6 una interrupci6n escultural del chorro de Ia fuente, que
normal mente se eleva en direcci6n vertical. Cuando Ferrer lo sus estudiantes)
apoyaban sus cuerpos contra el chorro, el agua se dispersaba en todas direcciones
como un chorro de orina. El trabajo de Ferrer fue una respuesta econ6mica a Ia
obra mas can6nica de Marcel Duchamp, que de cierto modo habia implicado un
tipo de acci6n en si. Para Fuente(Fountain), de 1917, Duchamp tom6 un orinal, lo
coloc6 boca abajo y Ia fi rm6 con el pseud6nimo "R. Mutt" enviandolo aIa primera
exposici6n de Ia American Society of Independent Artists, en Nueva York. Par su
parte, Ferrer tom6 Ia fuente del PMA y su propio cuerpo lo su sustituto) como
ready-mades para desarrollar su acci6n.
El aiio 1970 fue importante para los artistas latinoamericanos en Nueva York.
Aquellos mas inclinados al activismo se unieron para formar el Museo
Latinoamericano ese a11o, en oposici6n al Center for Inter-American Relations y sus
particlarios, pucs consideraban cuestionable esta afiliacion Aunque tenian ideas
nobles y redactaron algunas cartas poclerosas, ciertos conflictos internos
provocaron su division. que clio Iugar al Movimiento par Ia lndepenclenci aCultural
de Latino Am~rica (tviiCLA) y provoco que el prupo percliera a Ia largil su energill
vcnfoque · Tanto Lygia Clark como Helin Oiticica habian estado en Nueva Yo1 k
desclc 1969. Esc ve1ano se Ileva acabo una de las mas importantes exposiciones
en el Museum of Modern Art que por prim era vezincluyo obras de muchos artistas
latinoamericanos en Nueva York. Se trata de Informacion, curada por Kynaston
McShine, del 2 de JUlio al 20 de septiembre de 1970. La exposicion buscaba
demostrar Ia naturaleza no objetiva y conceptual en ascenso en los movimientos
intcrnacionale$de arL lncluy6 pi~:;LtJS deArtur Barri o, Rafael Ferrer, David Lamelas,
Cilclo Meirelcs. Marta Mimljin. The New York Graphic Workshop (compuestn cle
L·1is rumnitzer. Jos(• Guillermo Castil loy Li liana Porter), Helio Oiticicia, Alejandro
Puente y Guilherme Magalhaes Vaz. La obra de Ferrer incluida en Informacion
equilibraba su proyecto para el PrviA Esta vez coloco 50 paste/usde hie!ol50 Cakes
of Ice) alrededor de Ia fuente del jardin de esculturas de MaMA. Desplegados casi
en formacion military flanqueando el cuadro central de Ia fuente, esta obra de ncas
alusiones transfonn6 una formaci on rigidamente simetrica, parecida a los trabaJOS
de Donald Judd, en un desorden ca6tico que se evaporo con el calor del verano.
A partir del golpe militar de Chile en 1973, Juan Downey tomo partido de vivir en
los Estados Unidos para crear una potente serie de obras criticas En una acci6n
realizada durante una marcha en Ia sede de ITT en NuevaYork el11 de septiembrc
de 1974, Downey distribuyo lo que parecia ser una camiseta ensangrentada qu
decia "Chile si, junta ~o" 27 Dos meses despues, despues, el martes 12 d:
nov1embre de 1975, llevo acabo el performance La bandera chilena (ChileanFlag)
en el canal Dde television por cable de Maniatan. Uso e~te canal publico par~
d1semlllar su mensa1e a una aud1enc1a norteamencana mas amplia Otro artista
argentino que perfeccion6 el usa artistico del acceso pC1blico de cablevisi6n fue
Jaime Davidovich. El habia llegado a Nueva York gracias a una beca otorgada por ]
Jorge Romero Brest, d11ector dellnst1tuto Torcuato D1 Tel Ia en Buenos Aires. Creo
un format a pionero de program a de variedades que se present6 por 5anos en el
primer canal de cable de Soho, Artists Tel evision Network. The Live! Show
liEn vivo!) estuvo en el aire de 1979 a 1984 en el canal J de cable de Manhattan.
Hacienda el papel del Dr. Videovich, Davidovich entrevisto a las persona lidades
mas vanguardistas de su epoca, incluyendo a Linda Montano, Ann Magnuson, Eric
Bogosian, Laurie Anderson, Les Levine y Robert Longo. Se burl6 y analiza las
convenciones yel vocabulario abreviado de Ia television, sus consumidorespasivos
y Ia man era penetrante en que Ia television contamina nuestras vidas Davidovich
fue un visionario del media en si y critico mordaz y parodicamente a los artistas y
1
al mundo del arte.
Luego de de jar Puerto Rico y llegar a Nueva York tras haber formado parte de Ia
Marina Mercante de Estados Unidos, Papa Colo llev6 acabo una accion temprana
que tomola forma de una falsificaci6n. Diploma 11971) es en efecto un diploma
de Licenciatura de Ia Universidad de Puerto Rico perfectamente eldborada 1
otorgando un ir6nico titulo academico al artista, lo que servia como burla de Ia
importancia que se cia a un pedazo de papel. Colo se inslal6 en Ia pa1te baja de
Soho, donde llev6 acabo proyectos como Escu!twa andante I Walkiny Sculpture), l
una pieza interactiva que podia ser manipulada par el pC1blico Mas adelante, los
palos de esa pieza fueron unidos para crear una "corona" visual para .I World
Trade Center. La pieza canonica de Colo, Superman 51(1977), consisti6 en correr
a Ia largo de Ia West Side Highway con cincuenta y un listones de maderaque at6
a su cuerpo y arrastro basta desmayarse del cansancio Este proyecto 1a sido
interpretado como un comentario critico sabre el estatus no reconocido de Puerto
Rico como el estado numero 51 de los Estados Unidos. Arrastrando los listones de
madera. cada uno chocando con los otros, Ia acci6n term ina par dnlllmbar el
cuerpo saludable.
J
Enla costa oeste. los artislils latin0s rc)prmdieron al c!ifllaculturill rc .:;; .. 1te de
dis tintos morlos. Pma fina les clc los scsenta, en East Los Angeles, t:! .r;J Gronk
IGiugio Nicandro I, Mundo (Eclnll'mlo) Mrza '/ Cyclona (Rnbcrt L<~ · '1) se
J
present(l en accioncs callejeras y performances que tenian qur; \ - con Ia
produccion del genero a traves de eistos medias. Sabiendo como qc:~- "r una
reacci6n publ ica usando sus cuerpos y atuendos, estos artistas bi:,'1,un sus J
primeras obras en el contraste conla ideologia chicana, que generalmenir, ,firma
los papeles de genera tradicionales y las estructuras familiares Par cjr"r;plo, en
1969. Gronk escribi6 y dirigiu una obra en Ia cual Cyclona fue el actor l}';·~ jpal y J
Mew creo las lllciS Cd ra~. La obra se llam6 Caca-racha no tiene all!lfJt'' iCaca
Roaches Have No Friends) El rroyecto se prescntri enun teatro al ai1 e iib ~ yen
Ia cancha de baloncesto de Belvedere Park. ennovie111bre de 1969. De a!£t: 1r.Jodo,
el periodico local Ia anuncio equivocamente como una obra para toda Ia familia y
los artistas recuerdan que el pC1blico principal procedia del conjunto hat·!tJcional
de Estrada Courts. ' El controversial performance incluia una escena en !'3 cual
Cyclona le quitaba los pantalones a un actor y mordia su "pene" (en rcnli Jd un
globo lleno de agua). Esta accion hizo explotar al globo y el publico conse1vador,
que arroj6 huevos, encendi6 hogueras y llam6 a Ia policia El trio tambien cre6
piezas de "arte congelado", en las que el gesto performatico indo lucrabavestirse
con rlisfraces y posar Irente a Ia camara. Finalment~. el 3 de junio dr 1971, el
grupo present6 Una boda chicana. el matrimonio de Maria Theresa G'onchita Y
Ching6n (/\ Chicano Wedding The Marriage of Maria Theresa Conc,'Jit- and
 Ch·ng6n). en el campus de California State University en Los Angeles. En esta
. 'za Cyclona se caso con su novio de Ia vida real, en un intento par "liberar" a
~~ State Como era de esperarse, Ia reaccion fue nuevamente violenta y
d rogatoria . Sin embargo, los art1stas estaban muy consc1entes de una cultura
epque hacia referencia no a los heroes culturales mexicanos, sino a David Bowie
~oAndy Warhol. Pronto vieron sus afinidades confirmadas a traves de Ia exitosa
pelfcula de culto: Rocky Horror Ptcture Show, 197 4.
Los "escandalos" de 1968, en los cuales Garfield High School en East Los Angeles
wvo un papel fundamental, reunieron a participantes clave en el movimiento del
arte de colaboracion (Asco). Los entonces estud1antes de Garfield, Harry Gamboa,
Jr., Patssi Valdez, Willie Her~on Ill y Gronk se unieron en una pub~icacion escolar
asf como en solidar~da d pol1t1ca. Gamboa en particular fue un l1der estud1antil
activista que habfa conoc1do a Robert Kennedy y fue acusado de subvers1vo y de
actividades antiamericanas en las audiencias de un subcomite del senado
norteamericano 19 Despues de Ia moratoria de 1970, este creciente grupo de
artistas unio sus fuerzas y se hizo conocido por su satira urbana de vanguardia
que, como el arte de Cyclona, no solo miraba retrospectivamente a su herencia
mexicana para buscar imagenes, sino que tambien se inspiraba en Ia actualidad,
en Ia cu ltiJra popular y los estereotipos chicanos. Asco empleaba tacticas
dadafstas paradesafiar las fronteras tanto de Ia cultura como del arte.
Apropia ndo~e del genera del mural y de las celebraciones navideiia s de Ia
posadas, normalmente asociadas con una expresion cu ltural mexicana, Asco
propuso obras innovadoras que actualiza ban y comentaban estas tradiciones
dentro de U1 1ambiente urbana. Por ejemplo, el24 de diciembre de 1971, el grupo
present6 su primer "mural ambulant ", Estaciones de Ia Cruz(Via Crucis, Stations
" of the Cross ), entre Ia gente que hacia compras navideiias de ultimo minuto en las
calles. Un Jesfile navideiio/protesta contra Ia Guerra de Vietnam seiialaba el
numero desproporcionado de gente de color que habfan sido rec lutados para
pel ear y morir en combate. El grupo se desplazo a lo largo de Whittier Boulevard
vistiendo eaborados disfraces. Herron estaba vestido como Cristo/Muerte con
una tunica blanca con el Sagrado Corazon pintado en acrilico y maquillaje de
esqueleto. Gronk era Poncio Pilato/Palomitas, con un sombrero bombfn verde, una
gran bols2beigede pieles y un cartucho de palomitas sin mantequilla Gamboa era
un zombi/1: naguillo con una corona del craneo de un animal. Porta ban un crucifijo
de 5 metrr :, hecho de caJas con carton pintadas de garabatos cafe. naranjas y
dorados . .': final del desfile en Ia est cion de reclutamiento de los Marines en
Goodrich e J'iward, hicieron una vigilia de 5minutos bendiciendo todo con pUiiados
de palomi .~ y dejaron Ia gran cru7bloqueando Ia puerta de entrada al edificio.
1
J Asco tamf ien realizo Mural ambulante (Walking Mural) el 24 de diciembre de
1972, en1 . puesta aque los oficia les habfan cancelado el desfile navideno anual
de East Ln<; Angeles, debido a los disturbios causados por Ia accion policfaca
relacionad1a Ia moratoria chicana y protestas porIa Guerra de Vietnam en 1970.
En esta oc i6n, Valdez, Herron, G10nk y Gamboavolvieron oWhittier Bouleva1d.
Valdez sr: ', <:ti6 de Ia Virgen dP. Guadalupe con ropa negra, Herron encarno un
personaj" '" J ll m ~ral que se hab fa aburrido de su ambiente estatico y habia
decidido r ' y Gronk era un arbol de Navidad de chiffon verde. Vestidos con trajes
ricamentc ';aborados, los artistas se presentaron como figuras de un mural que
salfan de las paredes a las atiborradas calles de East Los Angeles Enla esquina
de Arizona Street con Whittier Boulevard, el grupo regres6 a llevar a cabo su
Primera cena (despues de un gran disturbio) -originalmente en ingles First
Suoper(After a Major Riot) - en una isleta de Ia avenida el 24 de diciembre de
1974. En ese Iugar habia ocurrido un tiroteo masivo durante los motines de 1973
Yel area fue demolida y reconstruida para intentar horrar su tumultuosa historia.
La cena de 1\sco, que usaba iconograffa del Dia de los Muertos, recuperaba el
Iugar comr un monumento a los muertos y su memoria. Asf, Ia cena se convertfa
en una especie de picnic en el cementerio. El grupo tambien habfa intervenido en
varios eventos del Dia de los Muertos, presentandose con disfraces que criticaban
las celebraciones semirreligiosas o de origen precolombino La ultima pieza de
Asco en esta linea se realiz6 en 1974. En Mural instantaneo (Instant Mural), Gronk
"pego" a Patssi Valdez y Humberto Sandoval a Ia pared de una tienda de vi nosy
licores usando varias vueltas de cinta adhesiva de papel. Esta obra destacaba los
fragiles vfnculos de un arden social invisible, "los If mites y exclusiones del espacio
social y Ia cultura que, aunque tacitos, son impuestos hegemonicamente "3o
Despues de que varios transeuntes se ofrecieron a ayudarlos, elias simplemente
se alejaron caminando.
Asco tambien se hizo famoso por otro tipo de acciones guerrilleras, que respondfan
asituaciones de discriminacion institucional, tanto en museos como en Ia industria
del cine. Durante Ia ultima semana de 1972, yen respuesta al comentario de un
curador de Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) acerca de que los
chicanos solo hacfan arte folklorico o participaban en pandillas, Gamboa, Gronk y
Herron colocaron etiquetas en todas las entradas de LACMA con sus nombres
grafiteados proponiendo el museo y sus contenidos como una obra conceptual
Spraypaint LACMA (tambien conocido como Project Pie in De/Face [Proyecto trata
en Ia cara]) solo duro un dfa y el graffiti fue inmediatamente cubierto con pintura
porIa institucion. Asco tambien desarrollo una serie de obras llamadas No Movies
(No Pelfcula) desde 1973 hasta finales de los alios setenta. Estas piezas inclufan
fotograffas de obras montadas, diseminadas como fotograffa fija de pelfculas
chicanas ficticias que resaltaban Ia ausencia de diversidad tanto en Ia parte
creativa como en Ia fuente de talento de los medias de comunicacion. Algunas
imagenes combinaban Ia expansion urbana de Los Angeles junto con Ia estetica
de ciencia ficcion o de glamour del rock-and"ro/1, usadas en obras anteriores de
Cyclona (tales como Gores, 1974); otras incluian imagenes que se referfan a
disputas territoriales y Ia realidad de conflictos culturales en Ia creciente ciudad,
como Carnada vfctima de Ia guerra de pandil!as (Decoy Gang War Victim, 1975)
Una parte fundamental de Ia estrategia del No Movie era Iacreacion de publici dad,
folletos e incluso ceremonias para premiar las contribuciones truncadas e
imaginarias de sus colegas a Ia cinematograffa Tales referencias intertextuales
(fotos, anuncios, cartas, comunicados de prensa, premios) apuntan hacia un cuerpo
alusivo (o su vacfo) de historias con figuraciones ricas y con Ia necesidad de una
salida, incluyendo vehiculos melodramaticos, fantasias de ciencia ficcion, sagas
del Oeste y thrillers sangrientos Proyectando Ia real rcchazando Ia filmado
(Projecting the real by rejecting the reel), ~~ este ludico jugueton y sin embargo
crftico corpus de obras apuntaba al deseo decrear cine y television clominante, asf
como el ansia de producir imagenes que representaran Ia diversidad de las
comunidades chicanas contemporaneas. El trabajo de Asco, que ha sido descrito
como una "infraccion social y territorial", · ofrecia espectaculos parciales que
instaban aotros a involucrarse. Es interesante destacar que en estos mismos aiios,
Hollywood comenzaba a interesarse por Ia comunidad chicana Despues de Ia
inauguracion en Broadway en 1978 de Ia obra teatral de Luiz Valdez, Zoot Suit, que
exploraba el asesina to de Sl eepy Lagoon en Los Angeles y los consecuentes
disturbios de Zoot Suit en 1943, Universal Pictures Ianzo Ia version cinematogratica
de Ia obra de Valdez en enero de 1982, con Edward James Olmos como ei meloso
narrador del filme, El Pachuco. Va ldez, que ha sido ampliamente reconocido como
el fund ad or del teatro chicano moderno, trabajo coni a United Farm Workers Union
para crear El Teatro del Campesino en Delano, California en 1965 Despues de
recibir una nominacion al Golden Globe por Zoot Suit, Valdez escribio y dirigio
entre otras obras, La Bamba (1987), que contaba Ia tragica vida del cantante
chicano Ritchie Va lens.
Felix Gonz~ l ez -Torres vivio en Puerto Rico de 1971 a 1979 y permanecio activo alii
hasta 1988. Cuba no de nacimiento, fue enviado por sufamilia a vivir con parientes.
Estudio en Ia Universidad de Puerto Rico antes de matricularse en el Pratt Institute
 de Brooklyn en el verano de 1979. En Puerto Rico, Gonzalez-Torres ll ev6 a cabo
varias acciones notables. Oos de sus primeras obras de estudiante revelaron su
familiaridad tanto con acciones internacionales como con Ia trayectoria de artistas
especfficos como Rafael Ferrer. Una de elias, En vue/to (Wrapped, septiembre
1978). al publicarse a posteriori fue titu lada Homenaje a Christo (Homage to
Christo) En Ia segunda, Sociedad(Society), tam biencanoe ida como Derritiendo Ia
sociedad o Actividad del hie/a (Melting Society o Ice Activity, noviembre 1978). el
y dos colegas emplearon dos toneladas de hielo para derretirlos en una plaza
publico Gonzalez-Torres le mencion6 a un reportero que el hielo habfa sido
utilizado anteriormente par el artista norteamericano Allan Kaprow en Ia obra
Fluidos (Fluids, 1967). asf como par el "escultor puertorriqueiio" Rafael Ferrer en
el Whitney Museum of American Art, definiendo tales obras como "arte proceso"
y "acci6n."JJ La obra de Gonzalez-Torres pronto interesase interes6 en el impacto
y Ia influencia de Ia cultura mediatica, asf como en el lenguaje y las herramientas
de los medias masivos de comunicaci6n, temas y formas que persistirfan en su
obra madura El 18 de marzo de 1979, Gonzalez-Torres present6 TV vacfo, vacfo (TV
Empty, Empt0 en el teatro de Ia Universidad de Puerto Rico, una obra que prefigura
intereses que mantendrfa despues Mientras el artista lefa un texto, dos
estudiantes estaban conectados asendos televisores durante una hora, inm6viles,
observando Ia sefial Iuera del aire de los equipos Este proyecto fue descrito por
Gonzalez-Torres como "acci6n de arte proceso" He aquf una parte del texto que
el artista lefa "En una conti nua metamorfosis se transforma en imagen, que en
forma graciosa se presenta, se ausenta, se repite y se convierte en heroe, en
autoestima, detergente, hamburguesa yse convierte en vacfo, vacfo [ Icontrolada
y modulada y asf caemos en Ia trampa "' 1
Ese aiio el artista conceptual, pintor y grabador Carlos Irizarry cre6 una obra que
tambien involucraba Ia circulaci6n de impresos, pero para prop6sitos muy distintos
Irizarry distribuy6 folletos que amenazaban con bombardear un avian para
protestar el estatus politico de Puerto Rico. El artista fue arrestado y a pesar de
Ia defensa de su acci6n como una pieza de arte conceptual, recibi6 una sentencia
par "terrorismo" de seis aiios en una prisi6n federal de los Estados Unidos. Irizarry
comparti6 galerfa en una exposici6n con otro provocador puertorriquefio. Joaquin
Mercado Una de las primeras acciones de Mercado en San Juan fue Ia
"instalaci6n" de un taro como obra de arte en Ia Galerfa Luigi Marozzini en 1973
Un colega de Gonzalez-Torres, Nelson Rivera, de Fajardo, Puerto Rico, tambi6n
comenz6 a llevar a cabo performances en Ia Isla, los Estados Uniclos yen Europa
i:l partir de mediados de los setenta. Sus obras ab rcan descle acciones rcalizadas
en call es , plazas pCrillica s y ce ntros cornerciales hasta mCrsica y teatro
experirnenta les En una obra posterior presentada en Evanston, Illinois, en
noviembre de 1991, Rivera realiz6 una de sus obras rnas notables, In Memoriam
AG M. que daba cuenta cle Ia masacre ocurrida en 1978 en el Cerro Maravilla . .
Esta obra, que incluye una cita de La Tempestad de William Shakespeare ("Esta
cosa de Ia oscuridacl reconozco como mia") destacaba el tragico conflicto clel
tJstatus colonial de Pu erto Rico. Utilizaba el ritual cat61ico, cantos sagrados
y Ia imagen tanto del sangrado como de Ia defecaci6n para refemse a
procesos somaticos en relaci 6n con Ia esperanza de una trJnsformaci6n cl ivi ;~ :
del cuerpo o del pais "enfermo".
Los oche11ta E11 Isla, de Ia costa Este a Ia Oeste
El 23 de enero de 1982, Fel ix Gonzalez-Torres present6 6xido. Suer/as sabre una
cama de hie/a (Rust, Dreams on a Bed of Ice). en Casa Aboy en Ia barriada de
Santurce, Puerto Rico. AI inicio Aleida Amador ley6 fragmentos de su poesfa. Luego,
Gonzalez-Torres apareci6 vistiendo un traje de bano, se aplico aceite bronceador
abundantemente y se acost6 en una cama forrnacla por cuatro bloques de hielo
imitando Ia pose de Adan en el panel de La Creaci6n en Ia Capilla Sirtina. Oos
'36
textos escritos en Ia sala lefan "Es mas seguro vivir de vacaciones en Ia tierra
propia" y "Hay que tener bolas para hacer alga aqu f" y Ia portada de un peri6dico
celebrando Ia industriaronera estaba pegada con cinta adhesiva sabre el piso Una
foto promocional de Dionys Figueroa, que apareci6 en el peri6dico E/ Nuevo Dfa
presentaba a Gonzalez-Torres y Amador sonriendo, con los ojos cerrados, y un~
sombrilla de colores de Iondo. El numero de primavera-verano 1982 de Ia revista
High Performance reprodujo Ia declaraci6n del artista junto con esa mismafoto
De abril de 1983 ajunio de 1985, Gonzalez-Torres inform6 por correspondencia con
Ia Division de Artes Plasticas dellnstituto de Cultura Puertorriqueiia (ICP) sabre Ia
presentaci6n de un video-instalaci6n-performance en el Convento de los Dominicos
titulado La playa. Sin embargo, este evento nunca se llev6 acabo bajo losauspici~
deiiCP En el verano de 1983 rea liz6 otro performance en Santurce, ahara por su
cuenta, que titulo La playa es sabrosa (The Beach is Nice). y describi6asf
Por trece dfas consecutivos jugue mi papel favorito el de turi sta (un
ejemplo de escape metaf6rico) La pieza se real iz6 en elmundo 'real' yen
]
el completo anonimato No hubo declaraci6n de prensa, no hubo utilerfa,
acci6n o texto especffico Solo objetos sucedaneos. Un peri6dico, Art forum,
una botella de aceite de broncear Hawaiian Tropic #3, un traje de baiio
]
negro yalgunas pifias coladas Yo simplemente me tire bajo el sol. Unavez
mas el performance no sucedi6, fue olvidado En Ia isla, Ia memoria est'
proh ibida jSaluclosl :~ l
Una intenci6n cfnica semejante en relaci6n a los manierismos del Cari be se
halla en la s in tervenciones performativas de Te6filo Freytes, tambil.1111aci do ' )
afuera de Ia isla. Freytes vino desde Mexico a Puerto Rico, clonde vivi 6 por
decadas yes una figura fundamental dentro del mundo del arte. Artista gratico
y multimed ia, activista y productor cul tural. Freytes cofund6 un espacio
alternativo en el Viejo San Juan, MSA (Manifiesto Sintetista Actuali zado) con
1
Yrsa Davi la, Cesar Stephenberg y Roberto Torres, que funcion6 de 1985 a 1991.
Como artista de performance, a lo largo de los anos ha creado varios personajes
que se rnofan de ciertas practicas del arte y de las jerarqufas institucr onales
incluyendo jurados, JUeces y crfticos Oescle 1986, el reparto ha incl uirlo al Sr.
Arte, Juez Ciego, Critico Ciego, Sr. Estetica, Curador Ci ego, Politico Ciego, .1\·tista
Ciego, Poeta Ci ego y Dr An6nimo Los alter egos aparccen en las inllllJ! ifc :iones
]
y otros eventos cul turales sin sor invr tados. m~le s tand o a los furo in·13rios
involucrados. Vcstidu cle su personaJC, t:lrngcniu mordoz llama Ia ~ · r"-:i6n a
preferencia s nacionale s, el nciin dr: lcl identiclacl propia y lo loca l, cn1L 1 _, • de J
interes y otros vicios del ark y el comercio.
Un artista puertorriquei1o que ha sido el blanco am istoso de algunds j ' las J
acciones de Freytes tambi cn ha presentado performances importantes. Dt.spues
de trabaJar con varios grupos de teatro desde 1966, el artista visual y maestrode
Ia gratica Antonio Martorell present6 Mana-plazael 9de noviembre de i qs~ . en
el pa t1o de Ia EscuLia tie Bellas ,\ rte~ de San Juan Dir ig ida p01 lie, a ~:.r isa
J
Marquez, con qu!"ll !1,1 so<;tenidn una larga colaborac i6n, csta pre ~ent: • r i • m de
diversas tecn;cas fue creada en rcspuesta a una rcdadu de 300 casas·1 r:rsucios
en todo Puerto Rico realizada par el FBI el 30 de agosto de 1985 Durante dicha
redada, Ia casa de Martorell en Cubuy tam bien fue allanada - Mano-p/a~o r. ra un
performance y lo exposici6n, titulada lnventario, inclufa las lotos de Ia casa de
Martorell tomadas par Jose Charron (ori ginalmente sirvieron como Pvic!encia
legal), asf como un inventario y dibujos cle objetos de Ia casa. La aCCI6n incluy6
actores en zancos, muchos vestidos de militares, Rambos y Barbies, cartas de
juego enormes que hacfan referencia a un conocido proyecto gratico anterior de
Martorell,:<'·dibujos de gran forma to de objetos domesticos (un enormRcepii lo de
dientes, una almohacla, un gran telefono Aclemas tocaron musica de percusruncon
los objetos domesti cos y se utilizaron cascos hechos de coladeras, bJntJeras,
 rnarchas, etc Un folletdo con brev es declaErac~o nMes de Martore lbl, _Nelson Rivera y
1
· Lowell Fiet fue produc1 o para e1even to. n e, artore 11escn 10
Cuando maleantes asaltan una casa el inventario Ia levantan
los habitantes con Ia ayuda de Ia policia
Cuando Ia policia de los Estados Unidos asalta una casa en
Puerto Rico el inventario Ia hacen los amigos
Este es el inventario de mi casa.
El inventario de una casa puertorriquena
Esta vez fue mi casa.
Manana, !a tuya.
Tanto Jose A Torres Martino como Nelson Rivera han analizado Ia larga relacion
de Martorel l con producciones teatrales y perfonmlticas de vanguardia y Ia
repercusion de su compleja obra 39 Tambien en 1985, otro innovador puertorriqueno,
Antonio Navia, llev6 a cabo un happen1ng Nubestratus (Stratus Clouds) en Ia
Universidadde Puerto Rico en Humacao, en colaboracion con musicos y actores.
Navia, un escultor ymiembro fundador del grupo artfstico progres1vo de los setenta
Frente,4D prorlujo un elegante corpus de esculturas que surgieron de sus estudios
cientificos I' csotericos Mezclando Ia tecnico con su poetica personal, sus obra s
respondiali ' !a as tronomia, el diseiio industrial y electronico, los estudios
semioticos y composiciones musicales. Las delicadas campanillas moviles de
Navia, consnucciones parecidas ajuguetes mecanicos y form as de nave espacial,
se activab<H' muchas veces a traves del movimiento, acercandolas al munclo del
teatro por su interaccion con el publico. El happening Nubestratus era una
extension 16gica de su preocupaci6n par el espacio, el sonido y el dinamismo
Mientras tanto, en el noreste de los Estados Unidos, en Massachussets Institute
of Technology (MIT) se present6 el video-performance Teleinteracto I, de Joaquin
Mercado 4i Esta pieza, que se exhibi6 simultaneamente en Vancouver, Tokio, Viena
yNueva York en 1980, estaba en sintonia con Ia propuesta Simultaneidad en
Simultaneidad(1966), de Marta Minujin Sin embargo, Ia obra de Mercado exploraba
Ia tecnolog;a nueva de video, asi como el potencial del mundo virtual. En Nueva
York, el ar: ·~a y residentc del Caribe Leopolda Maier, un artista argentino de
nacimiento.'tJ'" se rad ic60111a RepC1blica Dominicana y ~yucln a funclar Ia Escuela
deArte AI;: -:c Chav6n en LaRomana, prescnt6 una obra importantaen el Center
for lnter-/1· .·flcan Relations r n 1982. En esta piCZllllliiYpersrnal. r\'laler hizo Ull
molde de s· ':uerpo, congel6 agua clentro cle ely cuanclo el agua se clerriti6, hizo
un te usor '"' el agua derretida. Esta serie, qu e tambien 1ncluyc al arti sta
dominican Geo Ripley, present6 acciones performaticas de artistas de todas las
Americas En 1982, en otro Iugar de Nueva York, Papa Colo hizo Ia coreografiade
una acci6n titulada Pulpo IOctopus) en el patio de El Museo del Barrio Esta obra
estaba cw,puesta por pedazos recta ngulares de madera acomodaclos en
formacio11 ; dcorde6n en los cuales los artistas creaban "paginJs" de arte.· En
1982, Coin ' ~~ li z6 Contra Ia corriente (Against the Current), en Ia cual remaba a
contracorri •;te en el Bran;; River hasta un puente cubierto con un paracaidas
pintado cnn un blanco-OJO para rescatarlo del rio contaminado De entre muchas
otras acciGnt: s, pinturas y obras de teatro, Colo dec lara que sus mas importantes
intervenciones son las que Ileva acabo como curador yproductor cultural de Nueva
York: en 1981 cofund6Junto asupareja Jeannette lngberman el espacio alternativo
Exit Art Coloconsidera este proyecto a largo plaza como parte de su obra.
En Ia Costa Oeste. los anos ochenta fueron particularmente dinamicos. Artistas
como Dav' ! ~~.,'il los, Guillermo Grimez-Pr.fia y Richard Lou proclujeron importantes
obras indi• riuales y tam bien participaron en uno de los gruposmas significativos
de finalest'·:siglo XX, el Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo(BAW/ fAF)
fundado en 1984. Desde su comienzo, BAW/TAF se establecio como un grupo
activo de artistas que creaban una obra politica ysocial relacionada con Ia frontera
Mexico-Estados Unidos, Ia hibridez cultura l, el espacio y Ia idea de frontera,
las violaciones a los derechos humanos en Ia reg ion y las condiciones de los
trabajadores indocumentados. Estos artistas "buscaron expresarse como
participantes sociales en relaciones activas co n las multiples fuerzas que
determinaban las realidades de Ia frontera." 43 Con sede original mente en el Centro
Cultural de Ia Raza, Balboa Park, San Diego, California, sus miembros fundadores
incluian a David Avalos, Victor Ochoa, Isaac Artenstein, Jude Eberhardt, Sara-Jo
Berman, Guillermo G6mez-Pena, and Michael Schnorr44 BAW/TAF ha tenido
distintos miembros y ha colaborado con varios artistas, lo cual ha dado Iugar a
distintas estrategias visuales y formatos de proyecto muy variables. El taller sigue
existiendo como un grupo de voces con distintas fuerzas y visiones. AI principia,
BAW/TAF mont6 varias instalaciones laberinticas interactivas que pretendian
reflexionar sabre Realidades de Ia frontera (Border Realities) Otra de las obras
iniciales !I picas de Ia tecn ica del grupo fue Fin de Ia linea (End of the Line),
realizada el 12 de octubre de 1986 (Dia de Ia Raza) En esta acci6n in situ
especifica, que se llev6 acabo al final de una barda de Ia frontera donde se juntan
las playas de Tijuana y el San Diego Border Field State Park en el Oceano Pacifico,
los participantes vestian atuendos estereotipicos de Ia frontera, con enormes
disfraces y accesorios. Rompieron espejos, voltearon mesas (lo que literalmente
hizo que los que estaban sentados cruzaran Ia frontera ilegalmente), quemaron
imagenes de los ba1cos de Colony compartieron mazorcas de maiz. De noviembre
de 1989 a febrero de 1990, el BAW/TAF tambien llev6 a cabo un numero de
intervenciones en una suerte de tierra de nadie donde familias y niiios se reunieron
para platicar y jugar entre Tijuana y los EEUU en el Soccer Field/Canyon Zapata.
Suturas de Ia frontera (Border Sutures) se real iz6en agosto de 1990. Fue un viaje-
performance de 2000 millas desde Brownsville, Texas hasta San Diego-Tijuana,
durante el cuallos participantes, entre otras intervenciones, fabricaron e instalaron
una serie de enormes grapas con las cuales intentaban cerrar Ia herida de Ia
frontera Boicot fronterizo(Border Boycott) se llev6 acabo el21 y 22 de noviembre
de 1993 (y de nuevo en 1996) En este proyecto, el BAW/TAF cerro el paso
fronterizo de San Isidro, llamando Ia atenci6n sabre el enorme estimulo econ6mico
que esta area produce Aunque ha habido alguna fricci6n entre las distintas versiones
de su hi storia, el Tal ler de Arte Fronterizo ha logrildo llamar Ia atenci6n sabre su
r t;~i6n ysus problemas, generanrlo siempre un trabajo rigurosamente critico
Un rniembro funrlador del B.4W/TAF. Da id Avaloscre6 en 1983 el Cuche de brmus
de San DiPgo !SJn Diego Donkcv C:ut), que insta16 en 1986 Iuera de una corte
f8de ral en San D1ego (donde se ubica el Departamento de lnmigraci6n y
NaturalizaCHin) La obra se inspiraba en los carros clecorados que hay en Tijuana
halados par burros pintados de cebras y usados par los turistas (normalmente
norteamerica nos queestan cle visita por un dia osoldaclos) para retratarse usando
sombreros enormes En Iugar de puestas de sol. cactus, rozagante s princesas
indiasy otros estereotipos prehispenicos. Ia version de Avalos presentaba Ia crud a
imagen deun hombre moreno siendo registr ado par un funcionario de inmigraciun.
C'J ando un juezmand6 retirm el carro alegando queera una cuesticin de seguriclarl,
Avalos oe rehuso. La obra fue confiscada e ir611i camente el circo puiJiicltario que
sigui6 al incidente dio Iugar aun debatepublico sabre las cuestionespresentadas
par Ia obra, asi como las involucradas tras su incautaci6n Avalos y Sushi (Ia
organizaci6n patrocinadora), con Ia colaboraci6n de Ia American Civil Liberties
Union, lograron que el caso Iuera sobreseido enla corte despuesde un prolongado
debate debido al hecho de que "Avalos percibe su papel como el de un instigador
que continuamente pone a prueba los limites de los llamados espacios 'publicos'
y 'privados' y revela Ia concomitancia de Ia realidad oficial y Ia suprimida "45
Otro participante activo de Ia BAW/TAF, Richard A. Lou, llev6 a cabo una
significativa acci6n individual. El elocuente comcntario sabre Ia condici6n de Ia
frontera, Puerta fronteriza (Border Door), tuvo Iugar el 28 de mayo de 1988. Este
performance-instalaci6n de ubicaci6n especffica se llev6 a cabo en Ia frontera
Mexico-Estados Unidos, un cuarto de milia al este del Aeropuerto lnternacional de
Tijuana y las Colonias Rom ayAlta mira en Tijua na Una puerta pintada de color oro
junto con su marco fue colocada en el arido paisaje junto a Ia reja de alambre de
puas. Despues de instalar Ia puerta, Lou volvi6 a su barrio en ellado mexicano, Ia
Colonia Roma, y distribuy6 mas de doscientas cincuenta llaves a Ia gente que
encontr6de camino aLa Casa de Los Pobres en Ia Colonia Alta mira El17 de junio
de ese aiio, Lou y Guillermo G6mez-Pena presentaron un ensayo de radio II amado
"Border Door" en el programa "Crossroads" de Nacional Public Radio. Lou continua
llevando a cabo proyectos instigantes y conmovedores. En 1992, present6
Titulares. Voces de los conquistados- 1992(Headlines Voices from the Conquered-
!992), en el cual usaba su propia cabeza rapada Invito a artistas de color a
proponer imagenes que usarfa en su cabeza, como tatuajes temporales Alllevar
estas imagenes a todos los aspectos de su vida diaria, Lou abri6 dialogos e
interacciones inesperados Lou tambien colabora con Robert Sanchez en una
ficci6n narrativa en curso llamada Los Antropolocos (Los Anthropolocos, iniciada
en 1992), en Ia cual un equipo de arque61ogos chicanos del futuro excava y
examina los misteriosos restos de una civilizaci6n blanca. Este proyecto asume
distintas formas e involucra lotos y videos performaticos en los cuales el
Dr. Ritchie A Lou y el Dr. Bobby J Sanchez desentierran e interpretan imagenes
tan desconcertantes como Ia portada de un disco del cantante Barry Manilow o
lotos que muestran Ia estetica de los jardines que llaman "Barrio Kinkaide". Con
humor y gracia, Lou continua provocando intercambios culturales.
Probablemente uno de los mas celebres ex alumnos de Ia BAW(TAFcs Guillermo
G6mez-Pena Nacido en IaCiudad de Mexico, G6mez-Pefla se traslad6 aLos Angeles
para estudiar en CaiArts y luego a San Diego a principios de los anos ochenta.
Ademas de ser miembro fundador de BAW/TAF, G6mez-Pena cofund6 el grupo
Poyesis Genetica en 1981 con Sara-Jo Berman, que tambien exploraba las tensiones
artfsticas ypolfticas entre los Estados Unidos y Mexico. G6mez-Pena se hizo famoso
par sus densamente poeticos textos en Spang/ish, que con frecuencia eran
difundidos en los peri6dicos y Ia radio, o a !raves de publicaciones experimentales
yde tecnica mixta, como Ia revista de Ia frontera The Broken LinelLaLinea Quebrada
(fundada en 1985) "' En 1988, su personaje multiple Bo1der Brujo (BruJO de Ia
frontera Icrul6 1a frontera para nacer de nuevo.· ' &of(ier Brujo su expresa por media
de diez persona1es distintos en cuatro idrflmac;, con mCiltiples presentaciones
intemacionales alo largo de varios anos. Es el cronistade G6me1-Pena oun chaman
de Ia cultura de Ia fron tera que intercambia ropa, accesorios, gr.nero, voces :
perso nalidadu~ en una "(con)fu~i6n de ~ignos uriJanus que caracterizd al barrio ". al
tiempn que circu!a pm entm un ~iem pre incomplc:o ·r cambiante lioxtu en cada
presentaci6n. ' En este trabajo, continuamente cambia de identiclades para poder
hablar desde y par distintas posiciones G6mez-Pena recibi6 los premios del New
York Bessie Award y Prix de Ia Parole (ambos en 1989). asi como una beca MacArthur
Foundation Fellowship (1991) por sus apor1es y originalidad, incluyendo numerosas
publicaciones ytrabaj0 de performanceen Ia~ ultimos 20 anos
Principios de los noventa: un rapido tour al Quinto Centenario
En 1991 -92, G6mez-Pena colabor6 con Coco Fusco, artista cubana radicada en
Nueva York. para presentar una serie de obras fundamental es relacionadas con el
Quinto Centenario del viaje de Colon a las Americas, un acontecimiento hist6rico
al cual muchos artistas respondieron 1991. Una cr6nica-performance (EI
Redescubrimiento de America par el guerrero para Gungostroika) -con el tftulo
original en ingles I 991, A Performance Chronicle (The Rediscovery of America
by the Warrior for Gringostroika)- se present6 como parte del Next WaveFestival
en Brooklyn f\ca demy of Music en Nueva York, del 15 al 19 de octubre de 1991.
Fusco. vestida de Ia Reina Isabel con un traje creado por Pep6n Osorio que inclufa
un sombrero Carrabelle, se movfa entre el publico vendi end aconcesionesde tierra J
del Nuevo Mundo. :9 Luego de este proyecto, los dos hicieron un tour como los
personajes de Dos amerindios no descubiertos visitan ... ITwo Undiscovered
Amerindians Visit I En esta obraclave, que viaj6 aNueva York, Washi ngton, Dc.
Chicago, Irvine-California, Land res, Madrid y Sydney, Fusco y G6mez-Pena posaro~
en una jaula como una pareja indfgena de Guatinau, una isla ficticia al este de
Mexico. Usaban ropas que eran un pastiche de atuendos aztecas, tafnos
hawaianos ycontemporaneos. Vestidos as f. rea lizaron tareas "tradicionales" tale~
como confeccionar munecas Vodun, levantar pesas, mirar television o trabajar en
Ia computadora Por una tarifa, contaban historias "autenticas" en una lengua .1
indescifrable. bailaban al ritmo de musica rap, posaban para lotos polaroid 0 (en
Nueva York) ofrecfan un vistazo a los genitales masculinos. El proyecto no s61o
criticaba Ia larga y vergonzosa tradici6n de exhibir ind fgenas, sino que tambien
provocaba Ia interacci6n de un pCrblico a veces desorientado porIa enganosa
presentaci6n museol6gica que inclufa interpretes y r6tulos. Fusco ha escri to mucho
sabre Ia amplia gama de reacciones provocadas, de nerviosismo a indignaci6n a
hostilidad, tristeza o complicidad consciente.so Diana Taylor apunta que esta
1
compleja pieza asume de antemano el fracaso de los espectadores, pue. ninguna
reacci6n serfaapropiada Taylor seiiala quepara G6mez-Pena, el espect;:;dor ideal
"abrirfa Ia jaula y nos dejarfa libres."' 1 Esta obra extenuante y provocaliordmarco
un hi to en el arte del performance contemporaneo
Otra artista importante de Ia Costa Oeste. Nao Bustamante, se hizo famosa en 1
1992 en los Estados Unidos par sus piezas transgresoras. En una aparerfa como
el personaje de Rosa, Ia exhibicionista en el popular program ade televi3i6n, The
Joan Rivers Show Encarnaba un personaje de excesos sexuales confusos, que Ia
irritante yreprimida conductoradel programa usaba como un caso de est•Jdio para
su invitada especial, una autora y experta en el manejo de sentimientos "Ieos".
En esta intervenci6n en vivo, Ia artista jugaba el papel de una latina es ercotfpica ]
para revelar el miedo que despierta Ia que el estudioso Jose Esteban Muii zllama
"brown feelings" (sentimientos morenos), emociones o expresivida Jes que Ia
educada sociedad blanca preferirfa reprimir.;, Ese mismo ano, Bustamante )
present6 sua bra lndigurrito en Theatre Artaud. en San Francisco. Para, .,~ta pieza
at6 un burrito a partes de su cuerpo desnudo usando un arnes de dildn c invitaba
ahombresblancos asubir al escenario para darle una mordida y ilbsoh. , ., rle 500
anos de culpa. Aunque era humoric;tico (us6 un burrito veget;:niano pa .1 · '·iender
a nadie). Ia obrA tuvo exito en cuanto a que alteraba el equilibrir., ,' :• , : tivo a
trJves cle su exccso Ia carne femenina desnuda. Ia sugestion sexual \'' ·· . ·rnisi6n
cle homhrec; blilncos Cnlcca ba a una mujcr latiniJ en 11n1 posici on ·1 - . Jridad
publica sobre hombres arrodillados que voluntariamente simulabar, .... "~1/atio.
La presencia dulce y vulnerable de Ia artista en Rosa e lndiyurrito s·, ;o :.,unenta
el malestar "Untitled" (Go-Go Dancing Platform) I "Sin titulo" [Pia tcfo:·na para
Go-Go}), una obra de Felix Gonzalez-Torres de 1991, usa una inversi61. Je ·apeles
sernejante a Ia de Bustamante. Para est a pieza perforrnatica rl arti .;·~ '· ::6 una
plataformil color azul clara iluminacla en los borcles. La esccna no I"' ..·iabael
placer escopofflico del publico, sino que servia como espacro sanc io!'""'' ;,ara un
bailarfn local Contratado para cada prcsentacicin de Ia obra. e! b2il~1! ~~ ._· iiitc;do
a bailar a su gusto durante cinco minutos Cdda vez. l~ao Bustama,r_._ JlnfJien
realiz6 La bella America (America the Beautiful, 1995-1998). una oivi' i. ·, gica e
inquietantemente ilumorfstica. En este proyecto deun tour internacion<JI, kl artista
explora comportamientos grotescos satirizanclo Ia delgadez. el cabelln nJhio, los
ardides femeninos, los concursos de talento y las normas dt Lelleza
norteamericanas. Bustamante tambien ha colaborado con Coco Fusco en el
performance de Cosa (Stuff. 1996-1999), un estudio sabre las muJeres latinas, Ia
com ida y el sexo, asf como sus expectativas, deseos y estereotipos culturales.
Poco despues del Quinto Centenario, en 1993, el equipo colaborador de a1 tistas
Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock y David Avalos recibiG financiamiento para; ~~ar un
 proyecto con fondos del National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), un organismo
federal. El apoyo vino a traves del Museum of Contemporary Arts, San Diego,
vincu lado a Ia exposicion La Frontera/The Border- Art About the Mexico/United
StatesBorder Experience. Los artistas concibieron un proyecto en el cual cobraban
su beca en billetes de diez dolares; los distribuian por toda Ia ciudad a los
trabajadores indocumentados, llamando a esta obra Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate.
Salfan alos fuga res don de los hombres se reunian buscando trabajo temporal ycon
frecuencia invitaban a periodistas acubrir el proyecto. Los artistas firma ban cada
uno de los billetes y le daban a cada trabajador un recibo, reconociendo asi
l solemnemente su contribucion a Ia economia de los Estados Unidos. Arte
Reembo!so provoco fuertes reacciones adversas por parte de los politicos y los
medi as de comunicacion '" Esto es un escandalo', dijo el Representante del
Congreso Randy Cunningham (Republicano-Escondido) en una carta a Iapresidenta
interina del NEA. Ana M. Steele, en Washington 'Oiffcilmente puedo imaginar un
usa mas despectivo del dinero de nuestros contribuyentes. Si estos 'artistas'
quieren ontregar dinero a extranjeros ilegales, que sea el suyo'", reportaba un
periodico s1 Un articulo de opinion tambien criticaba Ia obra, "Una cosa es decir
que el gobierno deba apoyar al arte con contenrdo provocador y otra cosa es
sancionar el acto de srmplemente mandar el drnero de los contrrbuyentes por un
tuba .. ,, Estey otros comentarios burlones apuntaban hacia el hecho de que ni los
trabajadores y ni los artistas eran vistas como contribuyentes economicos o
fiscales Los artistas anticiparon esta reaccion y esperaban que a traves de un
debate publico se discutieran cuestiones que el evento de arte publico pretendia
plantear De hecho, contaban con Ia reaccion de los medias de comunicacion como
un cornponente del proyecto. Como Avalos declar6, "Nosotros no crcamos estas
controvuoias Elias ya existen. En el caso de Arte Reembo!so, ya habia una
corrienleanti-inmigrante ... y no habia un debate porque Ia cuestion era vista solo
desde un angulo. Estos proyectos tienen como finalidad revelar oposicion a lo que
se presenta como una agen~a politica ya consolidada."'' A traves de Arte
Reembo/, o, Sisco, Hock y Avalos abrieron temas diffciles a Ia discus ion.
Desgraciadamente, Arte Reembo/so fue otro proyecto polemico financiado por el
NEA que siguio a Ia controversia de 1990 conocida como el caso "NEA Four".'"
Como resultado, el NEA retiro el apoyo financiero al Museum of Contemporary
Arts en San Diego Oos anos despues, eliminaria las becas individuales para
artisas pry completo
En Ia Co , :~ ~ste yen Puerto Rico numerosos artistasempczaron a pr eoentar obrils
perform~·.;;cJ s en Ia segunda mitad de los noventa. Entre ell os estaban, Freddie
Mercado. 111a Rosa Rivera Morrero y el dCro Aflora & Cal2adrl la.'·' Una oiYa
canonic·. .·; Ia epoca creada por el artista de origen puertorriqueiio radicado en
Nueva Yn.:, Adal es el establecimiento de El Puerto Rican Embassy; EI Spirit
Republic de Puerto Rico Junto con su "co-director" el Reverendo Pedro Pietri.
Adal presento originalmente esta accion en Kenkeleba House, un espacio de arte
alternativo enel Lower East Side de Nueva York en 1994. El Puerto Rican Embassy
produjo El Passport(diseiiado por Ada I. 1994), asi como Himno NaciOilal Spang/ish
(The Spa ;yiish Natiuna/.4nthem. 1993) y El Put3rto Rican Embassy tvlanifesto
(1994; ar !l'l~ escritos prn Pietri); n0rnin6 taml'ien a los Em/Jajadores de las Artes
Fuera de r<o (Out of FocU'; Ambas adots of the rlrts) Miriam Colon (Teatro); Ratrl
Julia (Cine); \1\fi llie Colon (Salsa); Piri Thomas (Literatura); Miguel Algarin (Poesia);
Antonio Martorell (Artes Visuales); y Marta Moreno Vega (Cultural La primera
edici6n de f/ Passport(con millitograffas) fue expedida al publico en1996 en El
Museo del Barrio durante Ia exposicion de Ada l Out of Focus Nuyoricans
(Nuyoricans desenfocados) series.s'l Este proyecto multidisciplinario exploraba Ia
condici6n politica y psicologica de los puertorriqueiios. Aunque son ciudadanos
legales delos Estados Unidos, con frecuencia viven como extranjeros en este pais.
El Passpo fr:>s una obra rnultifac8ticil yhurnoristica AI experlir este documcnto P.n
Spanglish, Adal creaba su propia evidencia de nacionalidad.
El proyecto de Daniel Joseph Martinez para Ia Whitney Bienniai(Whitney Museum
of American Art, 1993) en Nueva York, se volvio un caso polemico de Ia llamada
exposicion "multicultural". Martinez rediseiio los botones de entrada que el
publico debe usar dentro del Museo usando las palabras de Ia frase "Nunca podria
imaginarme ser blanco" y las imprimio en los botones que normalmente dicen
"WMMA". De esta manera, su proyecto Etiqueta de museo. Segundo movimiento-
Obertura uObertura con c!aques-Obertura con miembros pagados(Museum Tags
Second Movement -Overture- or Overture con Claque-Overture with Hired
Members), involucraba a un publico amplio como complice inconsciente. Cada uno
llevaba una parte de Ia frase, pero solo podia formarse Ia frase entera si se daban
cuenta de Ia presencia de los otros y de los botones como una obra de arte
completa. Martinez rompi61as convenciones y etiqueta de Ia visita a los museos,
obligando al publico del Whitney (en su mayoria blancos de clase media) a portar
su declaracion en sus solapas. Como el recorte vanguardista de un poema o las
operaciones de rayar discos de un OJ, Ia declaracion adquiere un significado mas
amplio a traves de esta repeticion fragmentada y al azar de un gran numero de
personas deambulando por el museo. El titulo de Martinez se refiere al hecho de
que los visitantes siempre se han sentido obligados a ser promotores de este
complejo mecanismo llamado "claque", Ia persona que era pagada para aplaudir
entre el publico de un teatro. Como David Levi Strauss ha observado, 'las palabras
y las frases en Ia obra de Martinez tienen significado y poder por su ubicacion
estrategica Esta atencion al contexto es escultorica."uo Laingeniosa construccion
de una cacofonia silenciosa que emana de un mecanismo institucional no usado
efectiva y economicamente plantea complejas cuestiones raciales, de identidad
cultural y poder politico Estos modestos botones y su misteriosa voz en primera
persona invierten Ia nocion de que ser "de color" es una posicion menos deseable.
La compleja trayectoria artistica de Martinez presenta dos tendencias constantes.
am bas performaticas El uso de imagenes enunciativas basadas en textos va desde
letreros y obras publicas hasta cuadros, incluyendo su serie Divina violencia
(Divine Violence). Un desarrollo mas reciente es su uso del doppelganger En el afio
2000, el artista creo una serie de foto-perforrnances (autorretratos) muy realistas
que involucra ban efectos especiales. maquillaje yprotesis Algunas lotos aludian
al genera de peliculas de ciencia ficcion, como las del director David Cronenberg,
en las cuales el artista parecia querer destriparse Otras se referian a famosas
fotograffas hist6ricas, como las que tom6 Eddie .1\damsde prisoneros del Vicicong
siendo ejccutadoseniJ callepor un ;~le de Ia p liciovictnamita. En estas imagem ''.
fvla r1 in~L aparccc constdntementecon el cuerpo mutilado. ensangrentaclo vIJcerdllo.
Esta seric rle performances de rcs i•;tenciil para Ia carnma aluden a IG obra de
Nietzsche El ocaso de los ido/os o Como filosofar con un martillo, en Ia cuol
propane que lo primero que hay que desacralizar cs a uno mismo. El artista
tenazmente manta su propio reposicionamiento empatetico en una serie de
papeles que siempre acaban en su destruccion.
Esta serie fotogrcifica performativa llevo a Martinez a experimentar con robots
animatronicos que !levan a cabo acciones programadas Moldeados a partir del
cucrpo del artista, los primeros de estos robots aparecieron en Ia exposici6n
s
To fviake A Blind Man Murder for the Things He Sven. or Happiness is Overrated,
(Hacer de un ciego el asesino de las casas que ha vista, o Ia felicidad esta
sobrer'aiorada). 2002. Arrodillado en una esquina y vestido con un uniforme de
trabajo azul, connavajas de afeitar en ambas manos y brazos al descubierto que
revelaban cortes, el robot de vez en cuando se reanima, se corta inutilmente las
muiiecas y rie. La representacion de esta crisis existencial revela un momenta
personal como un ciclo disfuncional en el cualla figura de Daniel no logra cometer
su propio suicidio. Llamame lsmae/. La Tierra completamente iluminada irradia
desastrc (Call Me Ishmael, The Fitllr Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster
Triumphant) fue el proyecto de Martinez que represent6 a los Estados Unidos en
Ia lOth Cairo Biennial. En esta obra, su segundo doppe!gcingeranimatron ico pierde
 el control de sus movimientos. Tirado en el suelo, sufre un ataque de apoplejfa y
convu lsiones que pueden compararse con una conversion religiosa. La obra se
bas6 en Ia pel fcula Blade Runner de Ridley Soctt, en Ia cual un androide sufre
cortocircuitos espasm6dicos luego de recibir disparos Sin embargo, el tftu lo
tam bienvincula Ia obra al personaje principal en Moby Dick de Herman Melville,
asf como a Ia figura principal de las tres grandes relig iones de Occidente. Aquf, el
contexto de Ia presentaci6n de Ia obra permite una lectura en Ia cua l el artista
presenta un personaje que recuerda al Golem como metafora de Ia disfuncionalidad
epistemol6gica y social en Ia sociedad post-11 de septiembre. AI revelar estos
momentos privados y amenazaclores, Martinez nuevamente involucra al espectador
y nos obliga a actuar Esta escultura performatica, particularmente efectiva, nos
presenta Ia desconexi6n somatica ysensorial en un espectaculo que permite imaginar
las distintas direcciones abiertas a los artistas de performance en el siglo veintiuno.
Este manifiesto fue publicado despues en fragmentos como "Destructivism Second
Manifesto" en Studio lntorndtional, 172, diciembrc 1966.
Declaracion no publica cia de Richard Huelsenbeck, 1965; copia en el arch iva cle artista de
Raphael Montanez Ortiz, El Musco del Barrio.
Robert Rauschenberg. Bed (Camal. 1955. El propio Rauschenberg cuestionaria poco
despues el significado unico · expresivo de sus cuaclros, Factum 1y Factum 2. 1957.
4 Ver Rafael Montanez Ortiz. Years of the Warrior 1960 - Years of the Psyche 1988 (New
Yor!: El Museo del Barrio. 19881, murstra curacla par Rafael Colon Morales con texto de
Kristine Stiles; Unmaking. The Work of Raphc~el Moiltanez Ortiz, curacla y con text a de
Rocio Aranda -Aivarado (New Jersey J,rscy City Museum, 2007) Kristine Stiles ha escrito
abundantemente sabre Montanel Ortiz y el destructivismo. Ver su tesi<> doctoral: (0/ASJ
The Radical Cultural Project of Event-Structured Art (Berkeley University of California.
1987) o su ensayo "Uncorrupt8d Joy International Art Actions." Out of Actions. Between
Performance and the Object. 1949-1979, Paul Schimmel. ed. (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1998), 226-238. Stilesha obwvado que fv1ontaiiezOrtizno era el uniw
artista que trabajaba con esta idea durante Ia epoca. En Alemania. el artista palaeo Gustav
Metzger escribio cinco manifiestos entre noviembre de 1959 y julio de 1964 sabre Ia que
elllamo "arte-auto-destructi•:o." Stiles otros criticos tarnbien han serialado un desarrollo
relacionado en Argentina. donde en 1961 Ia e.. posicion Ait<J Destructivo tuvo Iugar en Ia
Galeria Lirolay de Buenos Aires. Poco despues de Ia evposicion, este grupo argentino se
disolvi6 aunque su trab jo fue pre ~ ent a do en DIAS. Para mils informacion sabre el
rle sorrolln argt!ntino. v r "Po ~ h i\rt ilml Post-Historic .1\rt Argentina (1957 -·1955)". en
h ,lfi Carn ··1 R~ l'lirt.? ·,· ll,; u"r Oh·:l. l'ds , !:'!, .' It: ·I Ui.ifli,ls II .u:!-Gwd<J Art in /.at in
A·n 1 :a ( n ~· ." Hil'.t:!!l il' :i L•Jf' lrn: '!alP. U:1i·,uc;t.,. Pre:,' enmlaL,JrJcioncon The t,luor:um
of FiPtl ,.\rts. Hr.Jstcr . 200-l), 12G -m .
;2 r;,-• ··;:').; lJ{ !~ '.:::i;. :ufY .lflS c~ p r l 1'";C 'l 10 1!e! 5 a! 2') :Je f 1 ~ ' U I 'n. d·. 19G7 I! incill 1/0
i r ~:;dlacrun=s .!e i/l a lcolr~ 1 u" ll\. ·~ · 1 1. ,,I H1nsc-n. Bi.:i Furb,ls llenlrid,, Gwffr 'I H ~:miric : ·,,
,\iJarl Kap•r .·:. Kaic f.,!rll ct. R1 pi ~>wi lrrtr,, Lrli F; cc~ rd. Stu L Rn<e. ~ :~ rol cd Schr;e,mrllll:, ·1
Jo111 Toelle; p e licula ~ \'performance<> de Philip Corn .r. Takc.hiko lir•u:a. Ken Jxobs. Fred
Lieberman, Charlotte Monrrnan. Yokr Ono, Nam June Paik Tomd s Schmit \' Ken 'arner
(fue orgJni,ddl' por John Hcmirrcks) La "pre-inJuguracion· de [)!AS USA tuvo Iugar en
Jt..I:Jn Sa!.ery ·:' 22 de .ar_o . ' .9:'!l e ncl. 1o :\1H ;; :'~ ~ n . Bier Fn!be<!lcr.dr:ck'·. J~>'l
Hrndrids. Charlotte !vlorrn.an. Htlrn.C!;IIl i~it ~ ch. Rapliaell,lontarie Ortiz. Nam June Paik,
Lil Pward 1 o rns. El simp0.;ir• fue r.dnccld.lo para oboervar el luto p01 r~l ilsesinato del Ur.
;. hrtin L J t! ~ cr ;:inJ I~ ri a1v! :.~ ... ~~ st;_ ~· na 1 :1 1 ~}.t f~ . ..ll 11S al ']~do IP1,n . 1958. l' l
Ur.• .<;tiCi ·.- 1. ~. : Uru !~) 1J.:lL7r.c?.·~._. ;;,·; i_l ·. L~ l<h·rt : ' Ji.JJ:n Gal' :r !• jq( :ycndr a Bici Frr!Jcc
Henrlr.cks. .1\1H ~ n , en. Ci@lottl: r ·inl,rrn<lll. NamJune Paik. Lrl Picard, Jean Toelle. Juri
Yal! ut ·, otros
G Raphael Monta1ie1Orti1fue un licb ac tivo de Puerto Rican Arts Workers Coalition. entre
otras or~oni 1 aciones .
Diogenes Ballester. " esthetic Development of Puerto Ril'an Visual Arts in New York as
Part of the Diaspora The Epitc1ph of the Barrio," <littp//wwwprrlream com/galeria/>
:o
Por ejemplo. Out of Actions ni siquiera menciona o incluye una nota sabre el pap
1
fundamental de Montanez Ortiz co~o fundador de un museo en Nueva York Seria dific~l
rmagrnar, par eJemplo, una drscusron de Ia obra de Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney que no
tamara en cuenta su papel como fundadora del Whrtney Museum of American Art.
Este subtitulo es un homenaje al importante ensayo de Carla Stellweg, "'Magnet-New
York': Conceptual Performance. Environmental, and Installation Art by Latin American
Artists in New York," The Latin American Spirit Art and Artists in the United States, 19Z0-
1970, con ensayos de Luis R. Cancel, Jacinto Ouirarte, Marimar Benitez, Nelly p rrazo
Lowery S. Sims, Eva Cockcroft. Felix Angel y Carla Stellweg (New York The Bronx Museu~
of tile Arts en asociaci6n con Harry N. Abrams, Inc , 1988), 284-31 1. Este articulo es una
imporante contribucion al campo. El titulodel articulo de Stellweg hace referencia a suvez
a Ia exposici6n. Magnet New }'ark (Galeria Bonino, New York, 1964), que present6muchos
artistas latinoamericanos que trabajaban en Nueva York en esa epoca
10 Groupe de recherche d'art visuel o Visual Arts Research Group incluyo como miembros
regularesa Horacia Garcia Rossi, Jul io Le Pare, Fran~ois Morel let, Francisco Sobrino, Joel
Stein e Yvaral.
11 Alexander AI berra, "Media, Sculpture, Myth," A Principality of its Own. 40 YPJrs uf Visual I ]
11rts at the Americas Society, eds. Jose Luis Falconi y Gabriela Rangel (New Yort.: Americas
Society, 2006), 155.
12 Alan Asnen, "Foundc~tion for the Totality," li1e East Village Other(New York 3gosto 1,
1957), 5- 6. SegCm Peria, "The Foundation for the Totality" incluia Juan Do~-m ey, Manuel
Quinto. Jaime Barrios, Waldo Diaz Balart. Jose RodriguezSoltero. Vicky Larrain, Carmen
Beacliart. entre otros. Llevaron a cabo happenings y acciones de estilo guerrillero en las
calles.
13 Entre\ ista con Christo yJeanne-Claude en Nueva York, martes. 13 de novien'b!r de 2007.
Estoy muy aqradecida alos artistas par haber com partido conmigo sus recuerdus d!' Greco
y de otros artistas. aclarando asi el evento en Grand Central Station, que ha siti J citado
vagamente desde Ia prirnera mencion en Alberto Greco. Francisco Rivas, cornisario
.I
(Valencia, Espana IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez. 1992), 24 7.
14 Los artistas que participaron en Street Works I fueron Vito Hannibal Acconci. Arakawa,
Gregory Battcock. Scott Burton, James Lee Byars. Rosemarie Castoro, John Giorno, Bill
Creston, Stephen Kalienbach, Les Levine. Lury Lippdrd, Bernadette Mayer. Mcfiith Monk,
Ben Patterson. Jolin Perreault. Marjorie Strider. Mr. T, Anne Waldman, Hanr.ah V/einer.
Street Works //ocurri6 ellS de abril, entre las <Wenidas Quinta y Sexta y Ids C:JI Ies 13 y
1t Street Works Ill tuvo Iugar el 15 de ma1o entre las calles Prince y Grar r!, ·, ! como
entre Greene yWooster Streets; par ultimo. Street V\.iHks IV potrocinarfa or :..· . .·,rctural
Le;1gue. tuvo Iugar en Manhattan entre cl 3 .,. el 25 de octubrc cit! 1959. ]
15 ~11.1
letre;osrer: mo a.:odos luerun esquinat~E de42mi ·, klarlisnn. 51 st !' fifth: ·''-' · Fifth;
15111 y Fifth; 44th y Frftli: <mrl 51 sty Si xtil.
IG 1/ir: t.,.;>l i ! "~r!h'J" ' n ·, Ter.l.d Rwn rrf;. "Chrn1 iJI !' ~!'i 1 9~i 7-· ?0fl 7' h1111 0:·:: r • ·.·I and
e..,'
DUliJterial::1iti1=1to <1 RCt'(lr '·liiiCl I_':I of the C•JIIrlrcdF'elrf in;,r ~Jt .. !! i'IL ,.,rt." ·~H'Iith
a 8,1'1rJ' Fr J·:1 Cm:fro•1:a!i <n I<' tmfrr=ll.Y. ,in [ \lif/Ji:im ufA,u,1nh ·,; Cm;r' 'i;p. : .·, .1:ists,
19dl}-:'007.' ictor r;, Noorthoorn. curwfora(Nu: York. t\merit'clSSoc;u·, , 2007< .. ,
17 Las grabacionrsen cinta incluian obras deVito Hannibal Acconci. Michael GPrl: ! , Scott
Burton. Ted Castle. Leandm Katz. John Giorno. Joseph Ceravolo, Dan Grahan1.l,er ·odette
Mayer. Ann Waldman. Lewis' drsh I' Hannah Weiner
18 Este proy~cto incluyo obras de Jame\ Lee B1ars. Enrique Ca,tro ~iti. /,l:u.J u' ;,,·,yelo,
Rr•br-ns Gerchman. A!r>x KD!,, Nicola., Knrsheni1·k. l PS Levine. f lar i~ 1l . Clm·s o:i rberg,
Rol erto Plate, A l~re• l r Ro rigue: M as y Juil!l Str r;mi, Jim RnsPnrJ'I st. Sus:1r J ~-.l~ado
(Pesce!, Svlvia Ston8, Marjorre Stridor y Andy Warhol. 1/er. Alexander Alben o. '.Jedia.
Sculpture. Myth" para rncis inforrnaci6n .
19 La s hojas fueron dep0sitadas en los elevadares del edilicio de Ia galeria en 29 \ Je: 57th
Street; elI rente de Ia casa en 4 East 77 Street; yen tres de:.cansos ue I ~$ LScd :~r ds del
almacen de 103 West 108th Street. cloncle Ia exposicion 9at Leo Castelli curadap Robert
Morris. estaba siendo inaugurada. Los siguientes artistas estaban en Ia rnuestra: Giovanni
Anselmo. Bill Bollinger. Eva Hesse. Steve Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman. Alan Saret, Richard
Serra. Keith Sonnier y Gilberta Zaria.
 Carta inedita, junio 1988, cita~o en Nina Castelli Sundell, "The Turning Point Art and
20
Politics inNineteen S1xty-E1ght. 20th Anniversary, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art
and LehmJn College of the City of New York, 1988, <INwwlehman.cuny.edu/vpadvance/
artga 11 ery/ga II ery /turn ing_po in t/ su nde II. htm>
Angel r re po, "Los eventos Morris en el campus de Mayaguez," Revistas de Arte, 3,
21
diciembre 1969.
zz Lucy Lippard, Six Years. The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972
(Berkeley Univers1ty of Cal1forma Press, c.1973). 115.
Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Double Negative A New Syntax for Sculpture," Passages in
23
Modern Sculpture(Cambndge, MA and London The MIT Press, c. 1977). 277-279.
24 Transcripci6n de una entrevista grabada con Rafael Ferrer, par Cynthia Veloric, 19 de
septiembrc, 1990; Philadelphia, PA. (Washington DC Smithsonian Institution Archives of
American Art). 100.
25 Luis C~ m ~it t er. "The Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA," A Principality of Its Own, 216-
229
26 Entre otrn. artistas brasilefios que estaban en Nueva York en 1969-70 se encuentran Iva
de Frei t;;s, Amilcar de Castro, Rubens Gerchman y Roberto De Lamonica.
27 Downey r.·1 bia creado otros proyectos exito,os con camisetas anteriormente. Cuando vivia
8 ~ Wu;:f.io,gton, DC, llevo ar.abo Bovcott Grapes del19 al 21 de septiembre. 1969. En esta
acci6n, [ Jwney creo camisetas con el sirnbolo de los United Farm Workers. Le dio las
camisddoa muchachos que trJbajaban empacando comestibles en los supermercJdos
locales tl'J8 debian usar las camisetas y rehusarse d cargar balsas de comestibles que
contuvi dn uvas. Tambi en vendio ediciones firmada s de las camisetas durante una
expcsiri,\:1en Luna Gallery y dono los fonclos a Cesar Cilave y Ia United Farm Workers
Organi; Jtirm of California (UFWOC)
28 Jennifc Flores Sternad. "Cyclona and Early Chicdno Performance Art An lnterYiew with
Robert l •':Jurreta," GL0(12 3. 20061.482.
29 C. Ond ~-; Shavoya. "Orphans of ~Joderni s m ThePerformdnre . rt of A' co," Corpu,; Delecti.
PerformanceArt of the Americas, Coco Fusco, ed. (London and Nev. York Routledge. 20001.
241 . Pa· " informacion mas reciente sobre Asco. ver Max Benavidez. Gronk, A Ver Series.
Revis/ t ·.<J Art Histon (Los i\ngeles: Chicano Studies Researrh Centcr- Uni ve r ~ it ,· of
Califorri" 11'viinncapolis University of MinnPso taPress 2007) yRita Gonzalez. Howard N.
Foxy Ct 1A Noriega. Phantom S~ghtings. Art after the Chicano Mo~em~nt(Los Angeles
U niver~' ' , uf Cdlifornia Press. ?008)
30 C. Ond· r· · ~ ,r;o ya "Clrpil,llt; nf ~J rcll'rn i :n ... 246.
31 "Inter · ·· Jronk ami Gamboa.'· Clusmearw l (otr,r,u 18761.3 1-33.
32 David= ~ .:ru, "fleiJ ;·.'. "1ci Extra: Onr Trud1ti• n rr 't\-11!''-G:rcle' Filrn in Los ilr'fJi I :,,"
Octobi . · ' . ntorio 19 9). 21
33 Lorelc; · ·l:1cse. "UPR stu l<:nts 'nwlt ' 'JCict, · and ~.0 [lJr•Jul.cl·· of 'c•J ... TJ-e San Jua:1
Star. 4 •; . l'o;·iembre. 1, 78. L .
34 En Ourir ··r \ Conramor Cuadtrl'u.'i duCteac, ·n t' lm rs!igacion Estudian(/, Re1ista de i,Js
Estud/•. . ,' : t12l Proqra•na de Est:J, fios lntensi1 ,,s(RioPiedras Recinto, Decano de Estudios,
Univer ;, -,1 Je Puer to Riro. 'Jol. IV. No. 2. rrimel SGmes tre, 1978-1979). 46. Citado
origin,.!, ··lie en ftlr1 Gor' 'a;i' ·-Tn:rps · Earlr Impress ons. curada by Elvis Fuente;. 'r
organ:· . . I,,, o~J>n• j: L ~J 1 ! '1 !NL '.' Yo·l. El Jlt "''" de1 B.jrrio. 20%1. E!v'' F•18f'l 0 ~ rPa1ini
toda lc ' , - tigacion oricpnal qu,; trajo a Ia lu1 e~ tas declmaciones tempranas) obras
estudi;:. ·deG0nzalcz-Torrl'S. Ellvlu ~e o agradece el apoyo de TheFel1x Gon1t1lez-Torres
Founda ~> { f1nd1 er1 Rosen Gal ~t~ry alllaccr estos documentos formativos y de trabajo a
Ia atenL: . . del publico
35 Las inic'··'··' AGJJ se refieren a ,\lejandro Gonzalez fvlalave, un agente secreto. Dos
estudi ~'.c~ indepcndr.•11das furroq asesmadns r·1 cl CcrrP Mnravrlla. Ia ubicaci6n dP
una anV Hde comunicaciones que mtentaban cerrar. cuando su pion fue descubierto por
un age'll ; que tenia conocimiento previa del asun to. Es de no tar que Rivera obtuvo PI
Doctorar!o en Performance Studies en Tisch School of the Arts. New York University en
1991. E·. uro de pocos artistas puertorriqueiios que se han dedicado a este campo
acaden-.' ' Cltro qur. mr rPr.e i11cncinn. p11Ps equvn flliJYacti"o como escultor y nrli';tn rlr
perform;·ii ::e en esta epoca fue Mclquicrdcs Rosario Sastre .
36 Coco Fu -·c•. C01pus Dt:lecti. 58-59.
37 Esta redada estaba dirigida a quienes se sospechaba albergaban sentimientos
antiamericanos, a los independentistas. o a quienes protestaban contra Ia invasion de
Nicaragua par los EEUU. En su ultima operacion en Puerto Rico, Richard W Held, el agente
de COINTELPRO en Ia oficina de San Juan, estuvo a Ia cabeza de agentes armadas del FBI
ysoldados de los EEUU que reali zaron redadas en toda Ia Isla. Se dice que abrieron puertas
a patadas, hicieron busquedas sin arden de registro, incautaron propiedad privada y
arrestaron a docenas de activistas. El gobierno de Puerto Rico no fue notificado hasta que
Ia operaci6n habia comenzado. En las audiencias antes del proceso, los agentes del FBI
admitieron haber usado procedimientos electronicos de vigilancia ilegales esper.ificamente
prohibidos par Ia constitucion puertorriquefia. y que crearon archivos sabre un nC1mero
sorprendente de personas-74,000.
38 Para mas informacion sabre este proyecto, Juegos de mana, ver el articulo de Miriam
Basilio en el volumen Graphics de Voces y Vis/ones.· Highlights from El Museo del Barrio's
Permanent Collection (New York El Museo del Barrio, 2003), 18.
39 Antonio Mart ore//. Obra Grflfica I963-7986, Exposici6n Homenaje, lma Bienal del
Grabado Lationoamericano y del Canbe (San Juan: Museo de Arte dePuerto Rico, La Cas a
del Libra, lnstituto de Cultura Puertorriqueiia, 1986) y Nelson Rivera, Visual Artists and the
Puerto Rican Performing Arts, 195G-1990. The Works of Jack and Irene Delano, Antonio
Martore/1, Jaime Suarez, and Oscdr M:stey- Villamii(N ew York Peter Lang, 1997)
40 El grupo Frente fue formado en Puerto Rico en abril de 1977 par los artistas Luis Hernandez
Cruz, Lope Max Diaz, Antonio Navia y Paul Camacho.
41 Mercado hizo ; u maestria en estudios visuales en Mil
42 Colo recientemente presento Pulpo de nuevo en Ia Galeria Nacional dellnstituto de Cultura
Puertorriquena, Conven to Los Dominicos, Viejo San Juan, del 29 de marzo al 2 de abril
de 2007. En esta segunda version se incluian cincuenta y un artistas y poetas.
Originalmentc Ia obra fu epresentacla en El Museo del Barrio del8 de julio al31 de agosto
d ~ 198 2 . Pa1ticipdron 25 artistas vi ual ~ s 'i poetn!> entre; los cuales se hallabdn Vito
Acconci, David Hammons. CatJiina Parra, Revererdo Pedro Pietri, Juan Sanchez'i otros.
incluyendo aAna Mencl1eta, una urtista fundamental que se radico en Nueva York en 1978
·1tuvo una act iva presencia hacta su tragica nruerte en 1985. r\unquc u obra secomrnta
en el ensayo sabre Cuba en este volumen. vease tambien Olga Vi so. Ana Mendieta. Earth
Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985(Washington DC The Hirsilhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Germany Hatje Cant! Verlag, 2004)
para mas informacion sobr8 su obra .
43 Dav1d Avalos. "A Wag Dogging a Tale." La FrontefJ/ (he Border Art About the
Alexica 'United Stat2s Burdw E<pcrlenc '. rurarja por Patricio Ch;ivez y Madeleine
Gry:m tejn. coo rd i•JJdora, Katilrt l Kanjo (San Diego Cl'lltro Cultural de Ia Ra za y rvlu se,lrn
,•f (.,Q:;:cmpo•ar·,r Alt. 1 9 ~ 3 1. 67.
:i l Vdle Ia pcna notal qt•J tamL:en en 1JB~ . n t a~ al norte. er: Sdil Fr t~ n c i s w , el grupo Culture
Clash fu e fundadrJ por Ins arti ;tas rillcdno:- Rir hard 1.101110\d, Ric Salinas y Herbert
1
s:Jwi,J Tom! ! ~ n Jdi·:, .. . !u;c i1 ~ ' itnCIOit,;" :c•. l' .!'•.iC J-a!l •.:icJilO'. pt' rOusan· !•J1111
estilo cumico clc sho,v de var:ed,des, Culture Cx h >i ~ ue hacienda ' atiras cle Ia p~litica
•, Ia soc1edacL
-15 ~.1acl r lein e Gr,.ns:tejn. "La Frontera/Thc Br'der: i\rt Abo 1 tile 1\lexico/United StatP<
Border bperience." La Frv:uera. 27.
~~ Otro art;sta LUtOu<;o hun. orisiin ~ L:.;z , p; .o•.acl.1; ,lei e~ pa iiul. el ir)es , el Sp· nglish
lo puso en el rndpa cult•nal al mismo tiPmpo e:: John Leguizarno. un ac tor mitad
puertorriqueiio naciclo rn Colnm1J1a que e~s ribiri y actuo en las prPsentacionPs de t8,Jtro
:ndepw.dionte co:JpersOUJt" •nu!:ip!cs 1:!a.TI . Aic· :'1(1991) ·; Si' C-n-11a•r.a (1 9Q3)
Amba,; gandron muchos pr~:: r. ,io s , :ncltr, or·lo un Obi ~ ,Afaml'o ,~iutrihi \ Li D.ama Desk
Award (Spic-0-Rarna).
47 Guillermo Gome1-Pe1ia cuenta comocon freLucnciaviaja primer acon un nue1o personajc.
cruzando Ia frontera de f\Jl(>xicoa los Estados Uniclos como una manera cle "darlo a luz" y
probar Ia fucrza de SIJ caracter. Guillermo GrHnel ·Pefia. Warrior for Gringos troika. E<says,
Performanre Texts. and Poetrv(St Paul, Minne,ota Graywolf Press. 1993). 29.
48 Robert Neustadt, "Guillermo Gome1-Pena Dragging ReprRsentation." Sincronia (primavr.ra 1997)
49 C Carr. "Rediscovering America," On Edge. Performance at the End of the Twentieth
Century (Hanover. New Hampshire Wesleyan University Press. 1993). 197. El vestido y
sombrero que us6 Coco Fusco. creados par Pep6n Osorio. asi como un ejemplar del
documento de concesi6n de tierra que vendi6 como parte del personaje forman parte de
Ia Colecci6n Permanente de El Museo del Barrio, New York.
50 Coco Fusco. "The Other History of Intercultural Performance." TOR, VoL 38. No 1
(primavera 1994). 143- 167; tambien reimpreso en Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here.
Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York City The New Press. 1995). 37-64.
51 Diana Taylor. "A Savage Performance Guillermo G6mez-Peiia and Coco Fusco's 'TheCouple
in the Cage'," TOR. VoL 42. No.2 (Summer 1998). 160-175.
52 Jose Esteban Munoz. "The Vulnerability Artist Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of
Reparation," Women & Performance. A Journal of Feminist Theory. VoL 16, No. 2 (julio
2006). 191- 200.
53 Sebastian Rotella, "Artists Give $10 Bills to Laborers." The Los Angeles Times. jueves. 5
de agosto.1993. A3.
54 "Watch This Intellectual Space ..." The New York Times. National Edition. domingo. 15 de
agosto. 1993. Editoriales, 14E.
55 Cyclena Simonds. "Public Audit An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco. Louis Hock y David
Avalos," Afterimage (verano 1994)
56 El caso "NEA Four" se refime acuatro artistas. Karen Finley, Tim Miller. John Fleck yHolly
Hughes. Estos artistas de performance fueron recomendados par un procesode selecci6n
para recibir becas del National Endowment for the Arts. Sin embargo, Ia recomendaci6n
fue vetada par el Presidente del NEA. John Fohnma1er, nominado par el presidente. en
junio de 1990. debido al contenido y acercamiento de sus obras. Los art istas apelaron Ia
decision y ganaron el caso en Ia corte en 1993. Recibieron sus becas. pero 81caso II ego
hasta Ia Suprema Corte de Justicia. En respuesta aeso. el NEA ilajo presion del Congreso.
deja de apoyar a artistas individuales.
57 La obra de algunos de estos artistas ha sido discutida anteriormente par Ia autora . Ver.
Deborah Cullen. Here & There/A qui yAlia SixArtists from San Juan (New York El Mus eo
del Barrio. 2001 ); Deborah Cullen. ed. None of the Above. Contemporary Work by Puerto
Rican Artists(Hartford Real Art Ways and San Juan Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. 2004).
y Paco Barragan y Deborah Cullen. No Ia /fames performance/Don't Call it Performance
(Salamanca, Spain Fund ci on Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura y New York El Museo del
Barrio. 2004)
58 El Reverendo Pedro Pietri fue un poeta. clramaturgo y au tor cuyos tcxto' de Ia epoca
despues de Guerra de Vi etnam. inclu·;endo Puerto Rican Obituary(leido por printer a>et en
el Young Lords' Ral ly en 1969). im ulsaron ,Jia diaspora puertorriqud,a en Nue\a York i1
h acci6n. Fuc fumlador del Nu, oriran Poe t' Cal ~ . 1 7'l. en el LL"!.er EJst Side. ',' lle1ti a
cabo lecturas en Ia cJIIe '/ l: li pliltil forma' del metru. lr.,a!tdo ~ cce su r ios interactJV J' ,·
pancartils wn ilirecciones.
5~ l a se~Ju n d c, edici(inde 1000 litcgr,Jfias fue e:,pedida enla doblc exposici6nde1\rfal. Blue
t<i!rwm [l fl Fire. Pn c! IJavid Rockefeller Center for Latin American Stt,dies de Harvard
University, y Blueprints for a Nation. en el Center for Ldtino Arts. en 2004.
60 David Levi Strauss. "Between OO[i & Wolf: 'To Have Been Dangerous for J Tllowamltll of
a Second' ." Br tween Dog & V\'olf. Essa}s an Art and Politirs in the li', i'!;JIJ: r f !11·'
Millennium IBrooklyn: Autonomedia. 19991. 116.

J
 Arte de acci6n en Argentina desde 1960:
(Ex)poner el cuerpo .
Ana Longonl
El hombre en acci6n como verdadera obra de arte.
(Alberto Greco, 1963)
Se ha inventado un arma. . .,
Un arma recien cobra sent1do en Ia accwn.
(Pablosuarez, 1968)
c· ula una anecdota que puede servir de mito fundacional del arte de accion en
tentina: en Ia segunda mitad de los aiios cincuenta, luego del derrocamiento del
r~ierno populista de Juan Domingo Peron, Oscar Masotta - que una decada
~oas tarde se convertirfa en Ia voz teorica desc?llante de Ia vanguardia- yotros
dos amigos repartieron estamp1tas con las 1magenes cuas1-rel1g1osas de Peron y
de Evita, su mitica esposa, fallec1da en 19~2 No Ia h1c1eron en Ia c~lle (en las que
estaba prohi bido s1qu1era menc1onar all1der exi11ado) 111 en las fabr1cas (donde
actuaba Ia llamada "resistencia peronista" con aetas de sabotaje contra el nuevo
regimen) Eligicron otro temtono, hostll pero relat1vamente preservado el Bar
Cotto, un privilegiado espac1o de soc1abi11dad de los 1ntelectuales, entre los que
predominaba par entonces un amplio consenso antiperonista.
La llamativa aceion del trio 1 -que implica una abierta provocacion- bien puede
leerse como "Ia primera performance argentina"/ aun cuando esa denominacion
tardarfa algunos aiios mas en instalarse como genera en el lexica del mundo
artistico. La tlli11Dcomo punta de partida en este relata acerca del arte de accion
en Argentinaenlamedida en que en ella estan inscriptos osugeridos algunos de
los rasgos mas sugestivos que encuentro en su devenir de alii en adelante.
Primero, LSe •rata de una accion artistica ode un acto politico? Veremos que Ia
imprecisiono I desbordamiento de los Ifmites entre accion artistica y accion polltica
es una tension recurrentemente explorada en otros momentos de esta historia.
Segundo, el hecho ocurre en un espacio ajeno al circuito artistico, en este caso un bar.
El espacio publicose lorna un ambito peligroso en un contexto historico signado par
Ia fragilidad \ Ia ilegitimidad del sistema democratico en media de continuas
irrupcionesdel poder militarY apesar de ser territorio de riesgo, Iacalle sera ocupada
por el arte ~P. accion una y otra vez, en incursiones que emulan las estrategias
guerrillerasPn <uhacerse notar pa1a luego desplazarse rapidamente aotro sitio mcjor
resguardado. L 'cero, Ia provocaci6n esuno de los efectos privilegiadoscomo man era
de interpel . ,,rpublico que se implica i1 voluntariamente en Ia acci6n. E a intenci6n
de incomod,•' 'J desacomodar (que se emparenta, par supuesto, coni a bL1squeda de
shock o de >ll ililamiento o istanciami.:mto caracterfsticas de las vJnguar ias
historicas) fLo ·~once ptuali 7ada explfcitam nte par algunos a1tistas argentinas
Vivo-dito
Pocos afics~cpues , Alberto Greco acuii61os" ivo-ditos" y otras modalidades de
practicar el artc involucrando su propio cuerpo y el de otros como soporte
predilecto deousmani festaciones. • ~61o se alcanza acomprender Ia magnituci de
Ia rupturaric r]rcco con el arte de su ticmpo, si se lo inscribe como parte del giro
radical en t! 1.1 0do de pensar y practicar el arte que implicaron los sucesivo~
movimientus de vanguardia ocurridos en Argentina durante los largos alios
sesentas Fu· Ia figura mas descollante y controvertida en los inicios de dichas
vanguard i ~s, signados par Ia aparici6n del informalismo, Ia incorporacion de
materialescfimeros o "innobles" y el gesto irreverente.
El hi\o colectivode este momenta inicial fue Ia exposici6n Arte Destructivo, llevada
acabo en 1961 en Ia galerfa Lirolay (un espacio tempranamente receptivo a las
propuestos wnerimentoles mas innovaclorils. en cl que tuvo unml protagonico liJ
artista yc1itica francesa Germaine Derbecq) Durante una no, el grupo impulsado
par Kenneth Kemble,' e integrado par Luis Wells, Silvia Torras, Enrique Barilari,
Antonio Segui, Jorge Lopez Anaya yJorge Roiger, recolecto de Ia basura restos de
juguetes, esqueletos de paraguas, ataudes quemados, baiiaderas pintadas,
sillones despanzurrados y demas desechos urbanos. Con todo ella se construyo
colectivamente una primera instalacion, que invadia todo el espacio de Ia galeria,
incluyendo el techo y el piso, en media de un cl ima penumbroso y de una banda
sonora enIa que se escuchaba un discurso transmitido de atras para adelante (par
Ia tanto incomprensible) del conocido escritor Manuel Mujica La inez. El explicito
programa que sustentaba este trabajo -que ha sido lefdo como "un manifiesto
en imagenes"J_ es el de Ia destruccion yIa revulsion como motores del arte.
Simultaneamente, Greco Ianzo sus vivo-ditos. Realizados en distintos lugares del
mundoB desde 19629 consistian en seiialamientos realizados en Ia calle (general mente
marcados mediante un trazado circular de tiza yaveces solo par el gesto de Ia mana)
en su mayoria alrededor de personas (desde una duquesa hasta un amigo artista,
pasando par un cantante popular, un mendigo, una vendedora ambulante o Jackie
Kennedy), ya veces encerrando objetos (un carromato, una cabeza de cordero en un
mercado), animales (un burro) o situaciones (un obrero yendo al trabajo, una senora
colgando Ia ropa) Llego a envolver mediante un rolla de papel de 300 metros par
apenas 10 centimetros (en el que habia escrito el Segundo Manifiesto Vivo-Dito) al
pueblo entero de Piedra laves, en Ia meseta castell ana, para firmarlo como obra de arte
ydeclararlo capital mundial del Grequismo vivant.
Los vivo-ditos ampl iaban de manera inaudita el universodel arte acircunstancias
cotidianas y a Ia vez irrepetibles en tanto instantes unicos, effmeros, que
desaparecfan poco despues de que el artista los firmaba y declaraba abras de arte
de su autorfa. En algunos casas, un fot6grafo registro el vivo-dito; en muchos otros,
de su existencia solo existe el relata. Es evidente el transito de Ia obra al gesto,
del objeto a Ia acci6n, que promovian los vivo-dito. "EI artista no mostrara mas con
el cuadro sino con el dedo", afirmaba Greco. En Ia linea de concebir Ia vida
cotidiana como territorio del arte, Greco avanzo en presentarse a sf mismo, su
vida (e incluso su muerte'") como "obras de arte". 11
Una lengua inutil
En1965. Jorge Bonino. un arquitecto y profesor universitario cordobes. inici6 una
serie de rememoradas performances a partir de Ia invencion absoluta de
una lengua. "un lenguaje inexi stente que no se entiencla" Publicit6 su primer
espectaculo (Bonino aclara ciertas dudas) empapelando Ia ciudad de Cordoba con
afiches escritos en cse mi smu idioma incomprensibl e. ylogr6 congregar infinidad
de personas que asistian averlo impartir catedra, vestido como un maestro y ante
un pizarr6n. algunos Iibras y un mapamundi, y se iban del teatro llevandose un
diploma luego de ser parte de Ia parodia de Bonino de enseilar "a Ia gente ahablar,
a escribir" En media de cada performance, un nino irrumpia en escena y
desacomodaba Rl pizarr6n oalgun otro elemento en usa. Su presencia p rturbaba
e impedfa cualqu ier naturalizaci6n de Ia ficci6n representada
E! inrne iato exito lle1·6 a BJnino all :1~tituto Di Tell, (ITDT, Buenos Aires), y luego
de gira par Francia. Espa11a, Alemania. Holanda. Cerca de Paris, II ego arepresentar
su descabellada leccion ante un congreso internacional de linguistas Con este
dispositivo verbal ponfa en eviclencia Ia arbitrariedad de cualquier sistema
lingUfstico y el hecho de qur. Ia construccion de sentido deriva de su usa
Su segunda performance, Asflxiones oenunciados, 19GB, invertia ycomplementaba
Ia operacion de Ia primera Esta vez, Bonino hablaba en buen castellano
proponiendose no decir nada, sinllegar nunca a formular una idea coherente La
gram6tica era correcta y cl vocabul ario tambi6n, pero lograba hablar en una
secuencia de puro significante vacio. Pretendia que Ia gente no pudiera aferrarse
a ningun punta de vista.
 Happenings y antihappenings
La artista que mejor encarn6 Ia popularizaci6n del happening en Argentina fue
Marta Minujfn12En 1963, realiz6 -en un terreno baldio de Paris- La destrucci6n,
que ellamisma ha nombrado como "mi primer happening". En este evento convoc6
a artistas y amigos a intervenir sus objetos y luego incendiarlos. En 1964,
transmitio directamente desde los estudios de canal7 de Television (Buenos Aires),
el happening Cabalgata "varios caballos pintan colchones con baldes de pintura
atados a Ia cola, mientras un grupo de atletas revienta globos y dos musicos de
rock son envueltos en tela adhesiva" n Y al ano siguiente convoc6 a un Suceso
plastico, en un estadio de Montevideo, Uruguay, al que asistieron 200 personas,
ademas de quince motocicletas policiales, otras quince mujeres gordas
persiguiendo al mismo numero de atletas, mientras unas muchachas repartian
besos entre el publico y algunos jovenes se envolvian en papel. Un helicoptero
arroj6 500 pol los vivos, lechugas y talco a Ia audencia. 14
Tambien en 1965 dos "circuitos-ambientaciones" alcanzaron un enorme impacto
publico. Ambos remitian a personajes, paisajes, practicas y lenguajes de Ia cultura
popular urbana. La Menesunda fue ideada por Marta Minujin yRuben Santantonin,
y llevada a cabo con Ia colaboraci6n de otros artistas 1>en eiiTDl Consistia en un
circuito al que podian ingresar ocho personas por turno. AI If vivian experiencias que
buscaban exaltar sus sentidos adormecidos. Entre elias, una serie de televisores
encendidos con el volumen altisimo, una pareja semivestida en Ia cam a, un gabinete
de maquillaje ymasajes, una lluvia de papel picado, tam bien el publico se enfrentaba
-como frente aun espejo- con su propia imagen transmitida mediante un circuito
cerrado de television. Quedaba asi incorporado aIa obra, como espectador de si mismo.
En f/ Batacazo, que a principios de 1966 se traslad6 desde Buenos Aires aIa galeria
Bianchini en Nueva York, el espectador trepaba por una escalera para toparse con
conejos vivos, caminaba sobre una figura de una mujer des nuda hecha de gomapluma.
La figura gemia bajo el peso de los visitantes, para terminar en un tUne I de acrilico
transparente sabre el que se estrellaban moscas. Este trans ito desconcertante exponia
al espectador aIa vista de los que -como el antes- aguardaban suturno para entrar.
En 1966 se produJO un nuevo golpe de Estado, encabezado por el General Ongania ·r
Sirnultaneamente, los medias de prensa declararon ese aiio como el "aiio de Ia
vanguardia", ante Ia repercusi6n mediatica de Ia aparici6n local del arte pop, los
happenings, las ambientacioncs y objetos, elminimalismo y los comienzos de lo
que luego se llamaria conceptual ismo Ese a1io naci6 tambien el grupo Arte de los
Mcdios:1cuya primera realizaci6n colr.ctiva, conocida como cl "antihappeninu".
consisti6 en Ia clifusion (a trc~ves de una serie de di spositivos como una falsi!
gacetilla, lotos trucadas, testimonios fr1guodo , complicidadesvorias1cle un hccho
que nunca haiJia sucedido (conc1 etamente. Ia realizaci6n de un happening festivo
y ludico, titulado Happening para un jabali difunto) El dispositivo fue eficaz en
generar Ia repercusion de Ia noticia en numerosos medias masivos, y -mas
tarde- fue desmentida par los mismos artistas. El oiJjeto de este proyecto no era
evidenciar Ia falsedad de los medias, sino una idea mucho mas de avamada pdla
Ia epoca: se1ialar que los medias masi os son capaces de crear un acontecimi ento
Por iniciativa de Eduardo Costa, apoyada por Juan Risuleo y Jacoby, el grupo encaro
una serie de experiencias de literatura oral, que desafiaban las convenciones
literarias a partir de Ia premisa de que Ia escritura recorta y excluye las marcas
suprasegmentales del lenguaje ParJ dar cuenta de elias. registraron -mediante
grabaciones- relatos orales de un lustrabotas, una psic6tica que sufria deliria de
interpretacion, etc. Violentaban asi Ia "conexi on entre Ia obra y su vehiculo 'natural'",
Ia literatura y Ia escritura, y apuntaban a expandir Ia nocion de "obra literaria",
reemplazando ellibro par el cassette, incorporando lenguajes orales registradosen
gral1 adoras, registros coloquiales o ca3ualr~s. sinninguna intencionalidad literaria.
Cuando presentaron estos materiales, en 1966, en eiiTDT bajo el titulo de Poemas
·1
ilustrados y Literatura oral, generaron un rechazo considerable de Ia critica, que se
negaba a admitir que aquel experimento con Ia oralidad fuese literatura.
La vida del grupo Arte de los Medias como tal nose extendio mas alia de un ano
aunque varias de las rea lizaciones posteriores de sus integrantes transitaron por 1~
misma senda. 1s lmpulsado porque "en un pais donde to do el mundo habla de
happening sin haber vista mucho, no eramalo hacer alguno", el teo rico y animador
de Ia escena de vanguardia Oscar Masotta 19 organizo en eiiTDT algunas actividades
sobre dicho genera y su contrapunto con el naciente arte de los medios.2u Masotta
nose limito a explorar desde Ia produccion teo rica esta distincion, sino querealiz6
algunos happenings y obras de los medias Uno de sus happenings, Para inducir a/
espiritu de Ia imagen, tuvo Iugar en eiiTDT en noviembre de 1966. Retomo, de un
happening de La Monte Young que lo habia impactado meses antes en Nueva York
Ia idea de provocar Ia separaci6n del sentido del oido, mediante un sonid~
electr6nico agudo, continuo yperturbador Masotta dejo al publico !rente acuarenta
hombres y mujeres mayores, vestidos pobremente, que se expusieron aser mirados
fuertemente iluminados y "abigarrados en una tarima", mientras un sonido
penetrante chirriaba en Ia sal a Los "viejos" se sometfan a ser mirados e11 esas
agresivas condiciones a cambia de una paga como extras teatrales, data nue era
expl icito para el publico, que -en cambia- podia retirarse cuando quisie~a de Ia
sal a. Masotta definio su happening como "un acto de sadismo social explic;tado".21
A fines de ese ano, tambien por iniciativa de Masotta vsu equipo, tuvn Iugar el
1
ciclo Sabre Happenings, que consistio en rcunir en un nuevo gran happeningvarios
fragmentos de happenings celebres ya realizados en otraspartes del mundo. "Los
copiamos como si fueran obras de teatro sujetas a guion, lo cual era un2 manera
1
de matar el happening otransponerlo alas reglas de Ia reproductibilidad", recuerda
Jacoby, cuando se suponia que un happening es irrepetible, un aco nt~c imi ento
unico. Un procedimiento intertextual tamar un conJunto de citas y componer con
J
elias alga nuevo que nada tenia ya que ver con sus origenes. La idea del ciclo no
era divulgar happenings ya realizados, sino "producir, para el publico, unasituaci6n
semejante a Ia que viven los arque61ogos y los psicoanalistas" Enfrentarlos aesos
l
"restos", ya nohechos sino signos de hechos ausentes, pasados. El desplaza niento
hacia los medias era cvidente "nos excitaba Ia idea de una actividad artistica
puesta en los 'medias' yno en lascosas. en Ia informacion sabre los acontl'· i· .ientos 1
\' no 8n los acontecimientos"
1
Ell Ia Alltibi enal
En octubre de 1966. un nutriclo contingente cl8 artistas de Ia vanguarrlid.' · 'uenos
.~i res'I Ro~· ario organ i,.6 en C6rcl.aba una insiancia al ternativa a J;, '!.' Bienal
Americana de ~\rtc auspiciada por las lndustrias Kaiser conoc Ia como
1
Anti/lienal.' • •l ient ras en Ia Ill Bicnal abundaba el arte abstracto, neot;'i•J. 3tivo y
cinetico, Ia Antibienal privilegio inte rvenciones ral lcjeras, ambie: .•. _·ones,
happenings, arte conce ptual y danza contemporanea A pesar de su imro·.:visada
J
organ iLaciun. alii ~c encontraronla mayor parted los artistas visual ~. liltlsicos
y grupo~ de teatro viwilados a Ia e.;cena experimen tal
Entre varias otras acciones, Ricardo Carreira realizo La acci6n encadet;rid1 colg6
una larga saga combada desde el balcon de Ia casona hasta Ia \'!'I eda de
enfrente ,; Pablo Suarez Ia recuerda como "una ohra total mente ins61i a ~Carre ira]
at6 Ia casa entera con un cable cle plastico, como si fuera un perro, al po, ip de Ia
luz" r. El ultimo dia los artistas coordinaron una improvisada accion col ctiva. El
publico se habia reunido ante el anuncio de un nuevo happening, titulado En el
mundo hay sitio para todos. Mientras los asistentes aguardaban pacientemente,
al(lunos a1tistas anularonla puerta de arcesn, tapiamlola yclavancloiLun<.• 1.1aderas,
de manera que nadie mas pudiese entrar ni salir Se fueron, dejando encerrado al
publico durante una hora, al cabo de Ia cual regresaron acompailados par un grupo
 . de estudiantes (quienes estaban en conflicto luego del asesinato de un
n~~er~soestudiantil en manos de Ia dictadura) lrrumpieron en el lugar coreando
d1ng~n es realizaron una manifestaci6n que concluy6 con un encendido discurso
conslglnau'blico cautivo (y seguramente, aesa altura, ya poco cautivado).26
ante e P
ion preanunciaba buena parte de las mutaciones que tendrian Iugar durante
EstaB~~~ pasaje de Ia obra a laacci6n, de Ia realizaci6n i~divid~al a Ia colectiva, Ia
19
a~ 0.Pdicaci6n
~ ·iaci6n artistica de proced1m1entos prop1os de Ia ~CCI on poilt1ca rad1cal1zad.a. Ia
deIaviolenc1a (en este caso contra el publ1co) como matenal estet1co
~81~ ~olaboraci6n estrecha con movimientos sociales y politicos de oposicionn
1
:6
ll
El itinerariodel 1968 . .
Alo largo de 1068, los integrantes de Ia vanguard_1a de ~uenos A1r~s y Rosano
itaban un vertiginoso proceso de rad1cal1zac1on (art1st1ca y pol1t1ca) que se
tranS d . . · · f
nifest6 en una serie e aCCiones e 111tervenc1ones, cuyo punta cu 1m111ante ue
~:cuman Arde '" La "nueva estetica" que pos~ulaban esto_s arti~tas avanzaba en
Ia disoluci6n de las fronteras e~tre aCCion_ art1st1ca y ac~10n pol1t1ca Ia v~olenc1a
polftica se volvia mater1al estet1co (no solo como metafora o 111vocac1on, s1no
incluso apropiandose de recursos, modal1dades y proced1m1entos prop1os del
ambito de Ia politica 0 -mejor- de las organiZaCIOileS de IZqulerda
Ef itinerario seinici6 el30 de abril de 1968, cuando Ia inauguraci6n del Premia Ver
yEstimar (en el Mus eo de Arte Moderno) fue interrumpida abruptamente par
Eduardo Ruano. uno de los artistas convocados a participar, seguido par unos
cuantos amigos. AI grito de "i Fuera yanquis de Vietnam I" y de otras consignas
similares. el grupo se dirigi6 hacia un panel con Ia imagen oficial del Presidentc
Kennedy protegida por un vidrio. El artista tom6 un ladrillo de plomo y concreto
rapidamente Ia destrucci6n de Ia vidriera que el mismo habia pr_eparado los elias
previos. Las autoridades del museo sol1c1ta1on Ia 1ntervenc1on pol1c1al y los
manifestantes sc retiraron rapidamente Ruano fue expulsado de Ia muestra, pero
Ia efectividad de su obra ya estaba lograda No era ni el panel intacto de los dfas
previos aIa inau uraci6n, ni los restos del destrozo (que adem as fueron mandados
aretirar inmedil tamente) Ia obra habia sido Ia acci6n misma de generar un mitin
yejercer una 'to de violencia polftica en el seno de Ia instituci6n artistica.
Pocos dias d2 :· 18s se inau9ur6 Experiencias 1968, en eiiTDT. instancia en Ia que
se condense' :;n Ia pue ta en lfmite de Ia experimentaci6n, Ia creciente
radicalizaci6n• · ~ftica de muchosde los integrantes de lil vanguardia porteiia y sus
conflictos irre ·,lubles coni a instituci6n artistica ycon el renimende facto Durante
los quince die_queduro Ia muestra, Pablo Suarez se instal6 en Ia puerta de acceso
allugar y en:reg6 al publico capias de una carta dirigida a Jorge Romero
Brest, directo! d I Centro de Artes Visua les deiiTDT e indudable mentor del arte
experimental En esta carla argumentaba su renuncia a participar de las
Experienciasc:. ninguna otra manera, a Iavez~ue definia su carta-renunciacomo
"obra". Hacfr, '. n llam do a su generacion a decir lo suyo Iuera de 1<, institucion
"esas cuatro ,. ~edes encicrran el secreta dP transformar todo Ia que esta dentro
de eliasen a· "· y el arte no es peligroso" '
Por su parte, RiJ berto Jacoby opt6 par inscribir su critica en el interior deiiDT y
despleg6 una 2ncendida proclama en Ia que citaba un pasaje de Ia carla que el
escritor mex. 1 ~ano Octavio Paz habia dirigido en 1966 al Grupo Arte de los
Medias ("se acab6 Ia contemplaci6n estetica porque Ia estetica se clisuelve en
Iavida socia! ") y conclufa que "se acab6 tambien Ia obra de arte porque Ia vida
Yel planeta rn ismo empiezan a serlo", ya que "el futuro del arte se liga no a
Ia creaci6n '> obras, sino i1 Ia dr.finici6n clr. nu~vos conceptos de vida" Su
entrega -que el define como "una mezcla mediatico-politico-ut6pica"lc- se
completaba:·m Ia foto de unnegro norteamerica no portando un cartel en el que
se leia "Yo tambien soy un hombre" yun teletipo conectado a Ia agencia France-
Press. Sin que el artista hubiera podido premeditarlo, el artefacto transmitia los
cables informando de las revueltas estudiantiles y obreras que conmovian Francia
en esos dias. As f. el mayo frances tuvo en esta instalaci6nde Jacoby su conexi6n
directa con el publico argentino, que podia conocer, discutir y llevarse acasa los
impresos del servicio de noticiasJI
En Ia misma ocasi6n, Oscar Bony present6 su polemica obra La familia obrera. Se
trat6 de una instalaci6n compuesta por un obrero, su mujer y su hijo (de alrededor
de 10 afios). sentados sabre un pedestal y dejandose ver par el publico durante el
horario de apertura de Ia exposici6n. Los acompafiaba una banda sonora que el
artista habia obtenido grabando ruidos de Ia vida cotidiana de su hagar Un cartel
. anunciaba que "Luis Ricardo Rodriguez, matricero de profesi6n, percibe el doble de
lo que gana en su oficio, par permanecer en exhibici6n con su mujer ysu hijo durante
Iamuestra". Ante las reacciones adversas que desencaden61a obra, el mismo Bony
explic6 "La obra estaba fundada sabre Ia etica y yo asumi el papel de torturado( J:
La obra que ocasion6 el mayor conflicto no era justamente Ia de mayor explicitaci6n
politica Roberto Plate mont6 el simulacra de un bafio publico donde el publico
podia entrar en unos cubiculos vacfos por puertas sefializadas con las consabidas
marcas de mujer y var6n. El artista propici6 que el publico percibiera un resguardo
de su intimidad suficiente como para producir "aetas de descarga anivel emocionai" 3J
Algunos de los graffitis an6nimos que empezaron a cubrir espontaneamente las
paredes hablaban contra el regi men de Ongania y una denuncia judicial termin6
en una arden de clausura policial alegando que Ia obra afectaba Ia "mora lidad
ptlblica" Lo ins61ito es que en Iugar de cerrar toda Ia exposici6n, Ia policia clausur6
unicamente Ia obra dePlate. Durante un dfa entero cientos de personas asistieron
a una exposici6n transformada (y trastornada) un policia y una faja de clausura
impedian el ingr so al "bafio" y se convirtieron en parte de Ia obra. La censura
misma se habia vuelto involuntariamente espectaculo
La reaccion de los artistas nose hizo esperar firmaron una declaraci6nen repudio
a Ia censura, destrozaron sus propias obras y arroJaron sus restos a Ia calle,
ocasionando una enorme batahola que culmina en una nueva intervenci6n policial
con el saldo de varios detenidos. Abandonaron definitivamente asi, con este acto
colectivo ytaJante, cl espacio institucional que hasta entonces loshabfa albergado.
Una accion con•;onante, esta vez protagonizada por Ia vanguardia rosarina, se
produjo en JUlio, cuilnclo Romero Brest fue interrumpido, mientras daba una
conferencia en Ia sala Am igos del Arte en RosariiJ Diez artistas protagonizaron
~n "asa lto", que definieron como un "simula~. ro de atentado" y "una obra de acci6n
colectiva". Recurriendo a una moclalidacl propia de un comando guerrillero, cada
integrante del grupo tenia una tarea asignada uno llev6 a Romero Brest al fonda
de Ia sala, otro cort6 Ia electricidad, los clemas se colocaron adelante. A medida
que unos gritaban consignas a cora, otros leian una encendida proclama que
reivindicaba Ia ida de Che Guc'ara como Ia m yor obr< de arte cxistente.
Algunas acciones del itinerario del 1968 evidenciaron Ia clausura - literal y
simb61ica- del ambito tradicional de exhib ici6n y el desplazamiento del arte a
otros ambitos. La vanguardia rosarina venia organizando desde mayo un Cicio de
Experiencias Visua!es en un pequeiio local alquilado en una galeria comercial.
Eduardo Favario present6 el9 de septiembre una acci6n consistente enIa clausura
de Ia galeria. El publico convocado a Ia inauguraci6n se encontr6 con el local
cerrado, con seiiales de abandono, y Ia puerta cruzada con bandas de clausura
que habia puesto el artista (detalle, clara, que los asistentes desconocian) y con
un cartel que rlaha instrucciones al pC1bl ico para traslada rse a otro sitio de Ia
ciudad. De esa manera, Ia obra se constitufa como un recorrido urbana
protagonizado par el pC1bl ico que aceptaba las instrucciones del artista
 Dfas despues, Rodolfo Elizalde y Emilio Ghilioni armaron un simulacra de pelea
callejera. Esta acci6n volvi6 a ubicarse en plena calle ante un publico casual. Los
dos artistas se enlrentaron primero verbal y luego lfsicamente, rompieron sus
propios aliches, corrieron perseguidos par un grupo de apoyo, y terminaron
rodeados de gente que espontaneamente intercedi6 e intent6 separarlos.
Un par de semanas mas tarde, Ia acci6n del encierro, realizada par Graciela
Carnevale, lue -sin proponerselo- el cierre del Cicio. El publico, nuevamente
convocado a una inauguraci6n, esperaba dentro del local. Carnevale salio del
mismo, cerro con un candado Ia unica puerta y se lue Durante mas de una hora el
pCrblico encerrado y el que se agolpaba aluera esperaban expectantes que pasara
alga, que volviera Ia artista, acabara con Ia broma yempezara con Ia obra. La artista
se proponfa "materializar un acto agresivo como hecho artistico". El "encierro" no
lue vivido ya como simulacion sino como una experiencia vital cargada de violencia
Si su intencion habia sido que el publico encerrado reaccionara y rompiera los
vidrios abriendose una salida, lo que ocurrio no lue eso. "Se genero tal tension
entre el adentro y el aluera, que Ia patada que rompio el vidrio lue de alguien de
afuera, una accion de rescale", recuerda. Otro, pensando que se arruinaba Ia obra,
descargo un paraguazo sabre Ia cabeza del decidido En media de Ia gresca,
apareciola policfa y clausur6 ellocal-esta vez, literal mente- par los disturbios.
Rotos drasticamente los lazos con eiiTOT y el circuito institucional, estos artistas
buscaron instalar sus acciones en Ia calle. AI cumplirse una no de Ia muerte del Che,
un grupo preparo un operativo clandestino, consistente en tenir de rojo el agua de
cuatro luentes de las plazas centricas de Buenos Aires Salieron de madrugada en
parejas que simulaban ser novios, con un tercero que oliciaba de "campana" o
vigia, llevando litros de tintura concentrada Habian montado un operativo de prensa
para Ia manana, aprovechando el impacto que esperaban provocar con las luentes
"ensangrentadas". La accion lracaso porque no habian previsto que el agua nose
reciclaba, y el color desaparecia inmediatamente, pero lue un indicia del animo de
riesgo que alentaba esas acciones calleJeras en plena dictadura. '~
La salida de los limites institucionales y Ia toma de Ia calle conllevaron Ia perdida
del resguardo del ambito conocido y Ia colocacion en un Iugar desprotegido,
vulnerable Se arriesgaba no s6!n el propio cuerpo del arti<;ta, sino tambien el
cuerpo cle Ia obm, quea vecescoincidi1 con cl cuerpo del mi~mo pCiiJiico E! gesl'1
de (ex)poner el cuerpo en esos tiempos signific6 riesgos reales y tuvn
consecucncias muy concrctas rep!Csion policial. clausUJ ·ls, hostigamiento, carccl
El horno
En septiembre de 1972. el Centro de Arte yComunicacion (CAYC) inaugurola muestra
Arte e ideologfa en CAYC a/ aire fibre. en Ia Plaza Roberto Arlt. ubicada en plena
centro de Buenos Aires Se expusieron alrededor de cuarenta obras. ademas de Ia
intervunciun de grupos de teatro, performance y rmisica. I\ iuchds elL las p1 oplic:stas
alii reunidas estaban ten idas par el eli mil rle politizac;6n e\trema q':P ntra ve~~IJ1 11
sociedad argentina en ese periodo, evidenciac!o porIa rebcl;on pop u!a~ en las callcs
durante el Cordobazo (1969). el protagonisrno creciente de los grupos guerrilleros yIa
retirada concertada de Ia dictadura militar de Lanusseque daria Iugar al ar1o siguiente
alas primeras elecciones desde el golpe de 1955 sin el peronismo proscripto. La plaza
publica se pablo de alusiones explicitas al clima represivo. paralelismos entre Ia
dictadura y elnazismo, relerencias a Ia masacre de Trelew (el lusilamiento ilegal de
dieciseis presos politicos en una carcel patag6nica. ocurrida apenas un mes antes de
Ia inauguracion), senales de duelo par los rnilitantes caidos y llamados al combate.
En ese contexto, VIctor Grippo, junto aJorge Gamarra y A. Rossi, artista ytrabajador
rural, respectivamente, construyeron en Ia plaza un horno de pan hecho de barro
y al dia siguiente lo pusieron en luncionarniento Sabre una tarima
de ladrillos y en media de una plaza ocupada par una exposicion de arte
contemporaneo, no dejo de resultar insolita Ia aparicion de un horno rural donde
se preparaba pan que luego se repartfa entre los asistentes. La obra implicaba Ia
revalorizacion de un saber popular y el traslado de un elemento de usa cotidiano
rural a un contexto citadino. Pero Ia operacion nose limitaba a mostrar un objeto
Iuera de su contexto habitual, sino que rea lizaba a Ia vista de reunidos una acci6n
que partfa de Ia construcci6n del horno, pasaba par Ia labricacion del pan para
1
llegar a su particion. Socializaban el pan, pero tambien el conocimiento, Iatecnica
Ia memoria (adormilada en Ia vida metropolitana) de como llegar a 81. Por otr~
parte, repartir el pan todavia caliente, que acababa de ser cocido en un horno
recien hecho, remarcaba que ese era el producto de un "estar hacienda" presente
inacabado. El enlasis recaia no en el objeto, sino en exhibir un proceso e involucra;
en el a los otros.
I
Apenas un dia despues de su inauguraci6n, luncionarios municipales orclenaronIa
clausura de Ia exposicion en Ia Plaza Roberto Arlt par Ia inclusion de duras 1
relerencias criticas a Ia dictadura y Ia pol ida (incluyendo Ia Brig ada de Explosives)
cerco la plaza, incautando y destrozando las obras. Ese lue tambien el destino del
horno de pan, cuyos restos partieron junto a los de otras obras en un camion 1
municipal con rurnbo desconocido.
J
La vanguardia platense
En Ia ciudad de La Plata, un grupo de artistas, entrequienes actuo como presencia
aglutinante Edgardo Antonio Vigo, desarrollo tambien distintas propuestas dL arte
de acci011 en los anos sesenta y primeros setenta. Vigo, artista 'r' poeta
experimental, introductor del arte correo en el pais, critico y editor de ro vistas
cruciales como He>.agono y Diagonal Cero, j inicio con ManoJO de semaforos J
(1968) una serie de senalamientos quese extenderian hasta 1975 ~; Cit6 al publico,
a traves de Ia radio y los diarios loca les, a observar un semaforo que regulaba el
denso transito en Ia intersecci6n de dos importantes avenidas de Ia ci udad. AI
desatar esta deriva poetica colectiva apuntaba a convertir Ia mirada sobre un
J
objeto cotidiano e invisible mas alia de su luncion practico-utilitariA, en
desalienada y desnaturalizada. 1
I
Parte del mi smo grupo. CarlosGinzburo reu li z6 c!csde 1969 una seri e de il .. 'ones
que defini6 como r.xpcricncia esteticas masivas. cn la:; quesol Ia involu<";, .omo
participe acl ivn no solo su cucrpn sino tambien P.l rlr otro' Fn 1971 . en ( ~ ,1arco
de una mu stra de Arte dt: Sistemas en el Museo de Arte Moderno, F·s,.ri. 6en
enormes caracteres Ia palabra "Tierra" soiJre Ia mismil tierra de untern.:p· ::aldio
pro imo al museo. Desde Ia call e. Ia inscripcion resultaba invisible, pero 1; 1rartel
daba instrucciones precisas para trasladarse ilasta Ia ventana de Ia va.a de
exposiciones clesde donde podia verse claramente Ia intervencion y viur "una
inesperada experiencia estetica". En 197 4, expuso en Arte de Sistema<> en
Latinoilmt:rica (Am!Jeres. Belyica) J una jo 0n prosti tuta con un cartel en c:i que
~e lei a en frances "iQue es el arte? Pro~tituci6n" Retomallil asi Ia li ~ra de
r,la:;otta y de Bony en cuanto a Ia contratacion de tercetos para dejarse ( !J1ner.
Otro platense, Luis Pazos, realizo en 1973 (en los efervescentcs meses ~rr, osal
retorno de Peron de su exilio en Espana, que se vivian en rneclio de un climade J
enorme e pectativa y creciente raclical izacion political Ia serie Transfomu ·nnes
de las masas en vivo. Junto a un grupo de estudiantes adolescentes. c mpuso
una serie de situaciones o figuras que registraba lotograficamente Algunas de
estas lotos circularon masivamente como postales. Entre elias, aquell a que
J
compuso con ilileras de chicos ilr.ostaclos snhre el pi so de una terraza una enorme
letra "V" baJo una "P". simbolo del vieJO slogan "Viva Peron", actualizado o;1 ese
contexto como "Peron vuelve". l
 Apesar del terro r
El de marzo de 1976 se produjo un nuevo golpe de Estado que dio inicio a Ia mas
24
cruenta dicta dura de Ia ~ue tiene memoria Ia historia argentina. El terronsmo
d Estado actu6 srstematrcamente en el extermrnro ilega l de toda oposrcr6n
neo solamente las organizaciones guerrilleras, sino ta~bien el sindicalismo
~ombativo, el movimrento estudrantil, Ia mtel~ctualidad cn~rca, e:c ) El secuestro
desaparici6n de 30,000 personas drsemrno el terror mas alia de los centros
~landestinos de detenci6n, paralizandoa gran parte de Ia sociedad .A pesar de ese
contexto atroz, exrstleron algunas rnrcratrvas colectrvas que permrtreron, aunque
Iuera de modoaislado y momentaneo . reartrcular lazos sociales ygenerar espacios
de resistencia y estrategras de desafro ante el poder desaparecedor.
Elgrupo Cucano fue una de esas increibles experiencias creativas en media del
terror Entre 1979 y 1983, un grupo de j6venes rosarinos, que sol fa reunirse a leer
juntos ytocar musica, Ileva ron acabo algunas incursiones en el peligroso espacio
publico con cl objeto de alterar Ia normalidad de Ia vida cotid iana bajo el reg imen
de facto Unode estos fugaces performances ocurri6 un domingo durante Ia misa.
Varios integrantes del grupo se mezclaron entre los fieles ycuando el rita cat61ico
habfa romenzado, uno de elias sac6 sus largavistas y apunt6 con el hacia el
saccrdote, otro empez6 a pedir limosna a gritos paseandose en silla de ruedas
porIa iglesia, uno mas dejo escuchar aquien quisiera ofrio una detallada confesi6n
sabre sus frecuentes masturbaciones y un ultimo cucano -al recibir Ia hostia en
Ia comunion- vomito sabre cl cura Desbarataron asf par completo Ia regulaci6n
normativa de una instituc i6n cuya complicidad con el regimen era enorme. El
accionar de Cucano no incurria en las formas estandarizadas de Ia denuncia
polftica, peroe a tremendamente eficaz (e ins61ito) enafectar en una escala micro
el arden inslituido 3 :
Paralelamente, en Buenos Ai res, desde fines de Ia dictadura y a lo largo de Ia
decada del 1980, funcion6 un colectivo de arte activista llamado primero Gas-Tar
(Grupo de Ar tistas Socialistas-Taller de Arte Revolucionario) y mas tarde CAPataco
(Colectivo de Arte Participativo-Tarifa Comun) Este agrupamiento reunio adecenas
de j6venes artistas, en algunoscasas organicamente vinculados al partido trotskista
MAS (Movi rniento al Socialismo) Trabaraban activamente en Ia ca lle - sabre todo
en ci rcunstanr i~ s de movilizaci6n- rea lizando impresiones de serigrafias que
convocaban a,;r inteNenidas par lospeatones(lasIIaman "nfiches participativos"),
uorganizanuCJ rnasivas acciones artfstico-polfticas como Vela x Chile (en Ia que
convocaron J e·~cender ve lasalrededor del Obelisco en apoyoaIa oposici6n chilenJ
al dictador P "lchet) o Blc!cletas a Ia China (una bicicletearla que instalabn en
distintos purM , de Ia ciudad Ia denuncia de Ia masacre de Tienanmen)
Larealizaci 6r~ .Je siluetas es Ia mas recordada de las practicas artfstico-politicas
que proporcinnaron una potente visualidad en el espacio p[rblico de Buenos Aires
y muchas otra.; ciudades del pais a las reivindicaciones del movimi ento de
derechos hurnanos en los primeros anos de Ia decada del 1980. Consisti6 en el
trazado senc::!c Je Ia forma vacfade un cuerpo a escala natural, logradoa travc:s
del contornr de alguien que se acuesta sobre el pa pel Esas siluetas fueron
inmediatamel'L pegadas sobre los muros de Ia ciudad, como forma de representar
"Ia presenciade una ausencia", Ia de 30,000 desaparecidos
31
El primer SiluatJzo surgio por iniciativa de tres artistas (Julio Flores, Guillermo
~exel YRodoilo Aguerreberry) que propusieron a las Madres de Plaza de Mayo
;o rmplementar este recurs amasivamente durante Ia Ill Marcha de Ia Resistencia, el
2.1de septiernbre de 1983, aun bajo dictadura. El resultado fue impresionante
crentos de manifestantes poniendo el cuerpo en ellugar de losausentes, dibujando
ypegando sih etas en un irnprovisado taller al aire fibre hasta Ia medianoche, a
pesar del operatrvo represivo re inante El Siluetazo senala uno de esos momentos
excepcionales Pn ~ue una iniciativa artrstica coi ncide con una dernanda de los
movimientos sociales, y toma cuerpo par el impulso de una multitud. Se logr6 Ia
momentanea apropiaci6n u ocupacion(politica y tam bien estetica) de Ia centrica
-y central en Ia trama de poder politico, econ6mico, simb61ico de Ia ciudad y del
pais- Plaza de Mayo y sus inmediaciones. Una ofensiva visual en Ia apropiaci6n
del espacio publico vedado.
Acciones en democracia
Ya retornada Ia democracia, apartir de diciernbre de 1983, las acciones de arte se
extendieron tanto dentro de espacios institucionales como en Ia calle, algunas
veces en estrecha vinculacion con movimientos socialesy politicos En los ochenta
surgieron circuitos under o alternativos vinculados al teatro, Ia musica y Ia
performance La artista Liliana Maresca integr6 esa movida y real izo sus muestras
y performances tanto en nuevas espacios institucionales (especialmente el Centro
Cultural Ricardo Rojas) como en ambitos marginales (el Parakultural) o ajenos al
mundo del arte (un lavadero automatico)
En uno de sus ultimos trabaros, poco antes de morir a causa del HIV, (ex)puso su
cuerpo semi o completamente desnudo en una secuencia de lotos tomadas par
Alejandro Kuropatwa, en Ia serie titulada Maresca se cntrega a todo destino La
serie se publico a Ia manera de un aviso publicitario en Ia revista de literatura
erotica El Libertino. El cuerpo progresivamente desnudo y exhibido de Ia artista
(que era a Ia vez el cuerpo de Ia obra) aparecfa superpuesto con el de Ia prostituta
-esta vez sin Ia mediaci6n en una tercera persona, como es el caso de Ginzburg
en su acci6n tOue es el arte7 Prostituci6n, de 1974. Una crftica a Ia condicion
mercantil del arte, que evitaba cualquier posicion de exterioridad en el conflicto
y lo encarnaba en primera persona.
A fines de los ochento, surgieron nuevas colectivos de artistas que retomaron Ia
practica de realizar acciones en Ia calle. En 1989, el grupo Escombros logr6 una
amplisima participaci6n de artistas yde publico en acciones colectivas en espacios
abandonados en las cercanfas de La Plata En Ia segunda de estas convocatorias
(La ciudad del arte), en una antigua cantera, los integrantes de Escombros realizaron
Sutura. aprovecharon un accidente en Ia ti erra, a Ia manera de un largo tajo o
herida, de 30 metros de largo, y lo "cosieron" con una sago Esta y otras acciones
del grupo insistian en denunciar en clave ecol6gica elmaltrato sobre el planeta
Por el Ojo fue uno delo' escasos colectivosde arte activistaque trabararon en Buenos
Aires en los primeros ar1os de Ia decada rnenemista (el qrupo estuvo activo entre
1989-199 ). Su trabajo se orienta fumlamentalmente a Ia gratica urbana, generando
una seriede murales enlugares ptrblicoscomo estdciones de trenes oplazas conun
particular c6digo en el que se entrecruzaban humor, crftica politica y unlenguare visual
proximo al comic. Tambien reali7aronvideos ycuando losimpedimentos tecnicos oIa
fa ita de equipos orecursosno les permitieron concretar sus ideas Hi micas, genera ban
performances callejeros quedefinfan como "video sin camara" ·n
Los escraches
En1996 apareci6 Ia agrupaci6n HIJOS, organismo de derechos humanosque re[me
a los hiros e hiras de desaparecidos, muchos de los cuales llegaban a Ia edad
adulta en ese entonces. Los HIJOS decidieron actuar ante Ia situaci6n de
impunidad de los responsables y er ecutores del genocidio ocurrido durante Ia
ultima dictadura, provocada por las llamadas Leyes del Perd6n y los indultos
otorgados par el presidente Menem al punado de comandantes que habia sido
condenado en 1985. Exigieron justicia y tam bien buscaron generar condena social
entre aquellos que convivian dia adfa con los represores impunes e ignoraban su
prontuario Para lograrlo, inventaron los "escraches", una modalidad de acci6n
directa ~ue parte de investigar el paradero del represor (el domicilio, ellugar de
trabajo) o del Iugar clandestine donde se tortur6 y asesi n6. Luego difundfan esa
informacion en un intenso trabajo de concientizaci6n en el barrio. Finalm ente
organizaban una movilizaci6n que convocaba a los vecinos a no olvidar y dejaba
seiia lado ese sitio en Ia memoria colectiva.4o
Dos colectivos de artistas fueron fundamentales al proporcionar a los escraches
una identidad visua l y performatica muy definida y caracterfstica. El GAC (Grupo
de Arte Callejero) ideo - emu lando y a Ia vez subvirtiendo las seiia les vi ales- una
serie de carteles que eran instalados en la s inmediac iones de Ia casa de un
torturador, un centro clandestine de detenci6n, una maternidad clandestina, o el
Iugar desde donde partfan los llamados "vuelos de Ia muerte" (durante los que
los prisioneros era n arrojados vivos al mar) Estos carteles eran tambien portados
par los manifestantes como pancartas durante las manifestaciones. Par su parte,
el grupo Etcetera reali z6 grotescas y delirantes performances en media de los
escraches, en las que representaban al torturador, al cura c6mplice, al apropiador
de bebes nacidos en cautiverio. El caracter carnavalesco y violentamente festivo
de esta practica se enfrentaba al pacta de silencio cimentado desde el gobierno
La dimension creativa de esta nueva modalidad de protesta, que logr6 reinstalar
socialmente el reclamo de juicio y castigo a los responsables del genocidio, fue
en principia completamente invisible para el mundo del arte. Ese silenciamiento
cambia drasticamente luego de Ia rebel ion popular de diciembre de 2001,
coyuntura en Ia que las iniciativas de arte activista se multiplicaron expandienclose
par todo el pals, y adoptaron distintas y novedosas modalidades de acci6n
callejera, que han afectado yalterado tanto Ia concepcion tradicional de Ia polftica
como los limites del artc.
"Vivir en arte"
Este recorrido trazado par algunos episodiosclave del arte de acci6n en Argentina
on el ultimo media siglo es si n duda aleatorio y mereceria incluir varios otros
capftulos.~ ; Puede pensarse en sus coincidencias y relaciones con producciones y
practicas semejantes ocurridas en otras partes del mundo, aunque percibir su
particularidad requiere considerar las modalidades que asumen los artistas al
huscar intervenir en un contexto hist6rico preciso, y los efectos que buscan
pro·,ocar, in que 11nplica mucha s veers Ia puesta P!1 cuestron el clesborde de IJ
separar.ion entre el artc ' Ia vida
En CiC :~c ntido, mas que confirmar Ia Lcuaciun A te t v; Ia, VflriC 1Sde los cpisoclios
aqui sintuizadoo plan tec~rr refornrulacioncs o intentos de super<H IJ cli<;!ancia o
c!ifcrencia que Ia ~1oclcrniclncl hn inst~1lado entre ambos territories. La disoluci6n del
arte enla vida soc ial quo Octavia Paz anunci6 en1966 ante Ia experiencia del Artc
cle los Medios, · aclopt6 desde entoncescli stintos programas artfsticos (y politicos)
dentro del arte argentino. Va rias cle las experiencias refericlas imaginan alguna
11ue a forma de confluencia entre arte y vida. sumutua imbricaci6n y redefinici6n
Alvi este textr con urn anecclota y Ia cierru con otra. ioualmentc mitica, que ilustra
en alrl111 'entirlo lo que quiero cle~ir. En 1969, Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos
recibio Ia beca Guggenheim (que como bien se sabe, suele func ionar como auxilio
para ar1istas e intelectuales latinoamericanos habitualmenteen situaci6n precaria)
El artista decidi6 destinar buena parte de esa importante suma de dinero a financiar
una opulenta cena en el Alvear Palace Hotel para unos veinticinco amigos y el resto
clel dinero sencillamente a vivir. "En vez de 'pintar' una comida, di una comida",
aclar6 ante las autoridades de Ia Fundaci6n que le pedfan explicaciones Con total
desparpajo, Peral ta Ramos defini6 asf su intento de "vivir en arte''.
Ademas de Masotta, lo integra ban Juan Jose Sebreli yCarlos Correas. Se trataba del ala
juvenil de Ia revista Contorno, Ia primera que se propuso revisar Ia instalada analogia
entre peronismo y fascismo que predominaba en el campo intelectual argentino de Ia
epoca. Los dos primeros colaboraron tambien con el peri6dico Clase Obrera, 6rgano de
difusi6n del Movimiento Obrero Comunista (MDC). dirigido por Rodolfo Puiggr6s, que
postulaba una articulaci6n entre peronismo y marxismo, entre prolctariado e
intelectualidad, busqueda que algunos aiios despues signa ria los postulados de parte de
Ia Nueva lzquierda argentina.
Asi lo sugiere Roberto Jacoby, entrevista con Ia autora, 2003.
Entre ellos, Ricardo Carreira habla de "deshabituaci6n" como el efecto que debe provocar
el arte de vanguardia. YEdgardo Vigo postula un "arte revulsivo" . Ana Longoni, "EI
1
deshabituador", Arte yliteratura en Ia Argent1iJa del Siglo XXI Buenos Aires Espiga>, 2006).
Nota del editor: La traduce ion de "Vivo-dito" mas comun es "Dedo vivo" porque se refiere
al aspecto deictico de Ia obra, en Ia que el artista selecciona eindica situacionesde Iavida
l
reaL Vea: lnes Katzenstein y Andrea Giunta, eds., LJ~·tcn, i1e1e. Now I Argentine All in the
1960s. Writings of the vant-Garde (New York Tile Museum of Modern Art. 2004)
Fredric Jameson propane pensar los '60 como una decada larga, quedura mas delosdiez
aiios que fija el calendario. Su unidad organica sc sostiene en "una hip6tesi ~ sobre el ritmo
y Ia clinam1ca de Ia situaci6n fundamental en Ia que estosniveles diferentes se d es~r rollan
de acuerdo con sus propia'> leyes internas" FredricJameson. "Periodizar los Los Sr«:ntas"
Los Sesentas sin una disculpa, Text a Social, No. 9l 10 (Prirnavera-Verano, 19841. 179. '
Kemble veniatrabajando desde 1957 en su :,erie PaisajPs suiJurbanos, collages de chdpas,
cartones. maderasyotro:, materiales de desecllo con los quolos migmnlt~s con"'r\ l i 1 ~ sus
precarias viviendas en las llamadas villas miseria, pero llast1 entonces nunca !labialc·Jrado
l
exponerlas
Andrea Giunta, Va uualilia, ill IN! .1Cillllillisrno I' j'[Jiit'ca(Bt!enns ,\irLS:, Paid6:, [[·11 ). 1
8 Greco realiz6 sus vivo-clitos en Paris, P:eclrulaves. l'v1adml. Nueva York. Buenos i\irc~. Rio
de Janeiro yotros lugares
En el Segundo Manifiesto Vivo Oi10. Greco remonta el origen del genera a 195l ruanda 1
empiezaa firmar personasdurante su primera estadia en Paris. "Firme parede_, r~je tos,
calles y banos de Paris en cornpan ia de Ia Peiialba LerclwnrJi" (reproducido ~n 11reco,
Valencia IVAM. 1992). 224.
10 Escribi6 con tinta china en Ia pi11ma de su mana Ia palabra "Fin" antes de _liir. :orse
ingiriendo IJariJittJricos en BarLelona en 1965.
1I Lrs vivr-dito ('S taban sin du,IJ on1parent J•Io con loc rr.,J:I ,·-II'mlc c!P DucliiHr:r . .. : yUe
QUardablHl a)rjL:: ,J<: di .. Wr -~ i (JS: j;•irnt! ·, :~ J ;r:rJ ;a!:T l iG ft.:·~~;.J /1 C! -id:<!.rtl ni !.•.l'r ·' .'\ al
··l,;qU (fl ' llje10l ert nn'·l ·lofoler~ de ~1 · 1 .•;(ivt". ,: ., , :;• ·. i ·,:~; ·1 ~.1 '- ;y ':!i 11. · ~ c ,_ .· 'Ide
· x;.1!:·a !,· eib mft •,>ibn :a c ·r;,Ji1 iU r ~ t fin1l'fi:l dt~ ! -'t! ~fJ' a m !t.ntu;: :,emu lo. n r_~ ;1 :~ !-> ::<':· en
:u c~ecci · '1. >'nn u•:;; ·:uhm~;l d :..·1l<1 1 11i1.JJ~ lit. I :ilti ·· t,J I, :~, :~ <HII"'IIfl' liiiJ:: Iar, · :...lad
ti. se~
alar 'JUL lla. ar:c -..~ · a ·~i li a. y qr, r-: r 1 IL t irl,a rq.. n.~ r.tw "i: ,u f·:d, :. · · esa
ir .. l;.. :l l . ~ < •'- !_. ru~ · j :' ,(,.:;;u /1 : ~....~ , : j.l l~ , c\, !,!JL ::wh d . i 1er
!'~ . ~~ 1 S . :l. [ ·~ C~~
,·!Jchards de1Jro tun galcr'<J clc ~H t P e"'ar:J el ::e ~m~1 : in:cia! dr:: eqlel (ll!' .,· c bie
·.e:llido de usdr ·, de contratilrJ de per,nnas con :n obril \ que rr. t0marnn otro" c·. · tas
inclu·iendn afAasotta rn 1~66 ·1 a8011 1 Jl 195B.
ureco practica tan-,IJi :n 0113 IIIC;,- i;:iicl- rj de ·lq:i;jn, qdP denomina , lllctilfJO:<'""' de
pcrsona1es aIa leln'· Cfll' in"nlt ;·nrl artn - , :1 prf' >.m:i:Jd1!! ~ i, iliro·- -dr a ~· , .. :,_·1Jre
un lnstidor 8' 1 blancoaur'i pP. ~ 'O I' il rca1. p.llo ''il iii cn f: prnd ~· d rc,:ltwnou · ,;·ta.
!Lj.,(f) ,LJ il t::~a ph .. d i J li ·,, .. :c.;i: '" (I cdCI;ij.lit' I fLit lis:. !I ll:IIJ .etica :1' Ia
reprbcn!iiCIQt, y P !ICliJ :I I,UIJ:J:. L' " ''Iii i..Jui 'J dr; I'J j'fe'I"ICI Cl de Unet:elp<i (jli8 I ~' ' ,•ira,
j
una vida rti11.
12 Otrosantccedcnte, dclliappeninq cr1 Buenos AirPs fuc:ron. en1965. La mwrtcenla rri~ ria
Lirolay (Dalila Puzzovio. Rubrn Sanlilntonin. Zu!r.mo Cinrdi·1. Del iii f:ancela. Davidt 1n :):· ~n. J
Squirru. Erlgardo Gimenc1yAntonio Berni) y los MicJost,ccsos en el teatro Lii Rccova(' .' ·:ilu
Marini. Edgarclo Gimenez, Alfredo RodriguezAriasy IVIiguel Angel Romlanu)
13 Jorge Glusberg, Marta Minujim (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de BellasArtes, BliP lOS
Aires, 1999)
11 "M<IIIil Millujln ysu SuL,,.;o c<1'i dt·1r iliiiiUII ul Cerro". [J {!illS. MuniGiiduu. 2G ;i,, JUlio d~ ,:J5.
15 Pablo Suare1. David l.omelas. Rodnlfo Pmy6n. FlorPal Jl.mnr \' LenpoldoI·.~;J ier.
 Como ya se dijo, un ra:go de Ia historia argentina desde 1930, acentuado a partir de 1955,
16 es Ia continua irrupcron del poder mllrtar, a traves de sucesrvos golpes de Estado contra
los gobiernos electos, que nunca llegaban acompletar su mandata.
El grupo estuvo formado par Eduardo Costa. RobertoJacoby y Raul Escari .
17
Entre elias, pueden sefialarse las sucesivas series de Fashion Fictions, que Eduardo Costa
18
desarrollo fuera de Ia Argentina a partir de 1968, propaganda en revistas de moda
fotografiasy avisos de musuales JOyas de oro superpuestas a Ia oreJa, los dedos del pre o
de Ia mana de las modelos, de las que en verdad solo existia un prototipo fuera de toda
circulaci6n comercial En 1969, despues de residir en Nueva York par varios afios, Costa
produjo los Poemas grabados ITape Poems), con John Perreault, Ia cuales estaban
relacionados con las obras de grabaciones tempranas. lncluy6 artistas como Vito Acconci
yHannah Weiner
19 Sus escritos sabre arte estan reunidos en: Oscar Masotta, Revoluci6n en el arte (Buenos
Aires: Edhasa, 2004)
20 La contr arosici6n entre el happening y el arte de los medias tiene en cuenta las
caracte risticas distintivas de las operaciones y las "materias" de cada una. La materia del
Arte de los Medias se presenta como "mucho mas social que fisica", segCm observaron
tanto Maso:ta como Jacoby y Eliseo Veron. Vease Happenings, Ibid , Eli sea Veron. "La
obra," Ranuna, num. 9-1 D. Buenos Aires. 2000-2001 (escrito en 1967)
21 Esto happPning de Masotta guarda abierta relaci6n con Ia conocida instalaci6n La familia
obrera, que dosafiosmas tarde realizara Oscar Bony (Experiencias 1968, lnstitulo TorcuJlo
Di Tella)
22 Roberto J<, Gb,', entrevista de Rosangr; la Rodriguez, Jul io de 1991. lncluido en Tn tos
diversos, in tlito, 232.
23 Tambien , g 1 ~1 conoce como 81enal Para lela oPrimer Festival de Formas ContemporanPas.
24 EntrevisWa Juan Pablo Renzi en Guillermo Fantoni, Arte, vanguardia y politica (Buenos
Aires El Cicio par Asalto, 1998)
25 EntrevistaaP3blo Suarez. en Guillermo Fantoni. Tres visiones ~ol•re el arte critico, (Roo.arirr
Escuela Edito ra, 1994)
26 Guillermo Fantoni, "Horizontes problemciticos de um vanguardia de los anos sesenta".
Anuario, Segunda Epoca. n· 13, UNA, 1988: "EI impacto de Ia nuevo en los primeros
sesenta. Coniormaci6n yemergenciadeun grupo de vanguardia", Anuario. Segunda Epoca,
34 Esta acci6n es similar a las experiencias que simultaneamente rea liz6 el mismo afio el
argentino Nicolas Garcia Uriburu en Ia XXXIV B1ennale di Venezia (1968) yen otras ciudades
de Europa, tifiendo de verde las aguas de canales venecianos y de diversas fuentes, con
animo de den uncia ecologista. Si el procedimientoes similar (verde/savia, rojo/ sangre), los
planteos son contrastantes mientras los canales verdes aluden a Ia defensa de Ia vida en
terminos ecol6gicos, las fuentes rajas recuerdan que se ha cometido un asesinato politico.
35 Fernando Davis, "Sefialar y revulsionar. Edgardo Antonio Vigo en los margenes de Ia
poesia", Jornadas sabre Arte yArquitectura en Argentina (La Plata lnstituto de Historia
del Arle Argentino y Americana, Facultad de Bellas Artes- UNLP, 2007)
36 Otra obra que puede leerse en estrecha relaci6n con los vivo-dito de Greco y los sefialamientos
de Vigo esel Seiialarniento de t1es objetos(1966), de David Lamelas, que consisti6 en rodear
con cfrculos de marcas blancas un farol, una silla reposera y un arbol en llll parque.
37 Se congregaron ochenta personas aunque el propio artista decidi6 no asistir, Ia que implic6
una operaci6n distinta respecto de los vivo-dito de Greco, en tanto el artista no es
imprescindible para que se produzca Ia experiencia estetica.
38 Cecily Marcus, "En Ia biblioteca vaginal: un discurso amoroso, " Politicas de Ia Memoria,
no. 6, Buenos Aires, CeDinCI, verano 2006-2007.
39 Daniel SanJurjo, entrevista con Ia aulora. Buenos Aires, 2007.
40 "Escrache" proviene de "escrachar". una palabra de Ia 1erga popular rioplatense que
significa JUStamente poner en evidencra, clc)ar a Ia vista, seilalar.
41 Par cuestiones de espacio, tuveque deJar afuera de este relata muchos nombres yepisodios
cruciales. que merecen una atenci6n mas destacada que Ia de esta mera menci6n en una
nota al pie entre varios otros, Lea Lublin. Leopolda Maier, los MJcrosucesos en los anos '60,
FDSA, La Drganizaci6n Negra. Ar Delroy y Ia actividad que tiene Iugar en Ia Barraca
Vortici sta desde los '90: el Taller Popular de Serigrafia. Ardel Arte, Costuras Urbanas,
Urbomaquia yvariosotroscolectrvos de arte activista surgidos en las inmediaciones de Ia
rebeliun popular de diciembre de 2001
42 Octavia Paz. "Carta," Oscar Masotta yotros. Happenings(Buenos Ai1es: Jorge Alvarez. 1967)
43 Peralta Ramosenvi6 en 1971 una cartaa Mr. James Mathias de Ia John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation, informando el destino del dinero de Ia beca Guggenheim de pintura, que
rPcibiera en 1969

I
I
n2 14, UNR. ' 989-1990.
27 Este hapw 1ing es un clara antecedente del encierro que real iza Graciela Carnevale como
corolario d>.. s: c r~ de Arte Experimental en Rosario lias aiios miis tarde, que se com!•ntcr
masadeldr: '
28 Esta rea liz-· '· '11 colr,ct:va llevac!a acab·J l'll elmiircr' in,trtucic::nl dc•ld Ce:1ld Gr'l"'dl d0l
Trabaj o de .\rqenti nus. IJ r;ullra l OIIUil optJSitord i1 Ia rlictiitlura. es hu,. Iii llriiS
renombrd· ..ir ~a vinn 0 ~ Ia .JilQilillliia or(JLII!illil de In~ '60. ear,rrma rcCOIISlrUCLiOil de
esta obra·; c.. ' to d91 itim:rilrin.t"!er!t r.•Jm·ul 1iirseen i\<nl onqon1·; !'.!'lri·IIIUMe stm~'l .
Del Di Tell; a Tuctmhin Arrle (Bueno ~ Airrs: El Cielo par i\sa ltu. 2000)
29 Pablo Suar.'z. cana roprocluwld en :1na Longoni \' l\1oriano Mestman. Ibid.
30 Entrevistac , RJberto Jocolly, Ibid
31 Una conex 1('11 m,is directa entre Ia va nrJuarclia ar(J8ntinci y el ma;o fra nces fue Ia
participac. · cc':IDPn Faris de losarlr las argentinasJul ro LeFare y ~ iar ;o Demarco. qu1::
termi naro:! 1oarJ<Js IPdicho !''!is 1'"1 ' ll \Qilclar;rlarl con lo' es turliiinl e<. Pocos iliif'l

mas tarde. c ·; Jrt st?.l la 11111Cl!P'r'canus rcsr,lcnlr<, en re e!!os LePare, se consti t u·,.eror~
en un gr u~,.J .1e trabaJO ron el nombre Am e~ ica Latina No Oficial Grupo cle Paris,
impulsando 1·' rlr:u:.ion de las conclusiones del Encuentro dePliistica LatmoJmerirana en
LaHabana ~ i972) asi como boico ts a Ia Bicnal de Sao Paulo. realizada en el conlexto de
Ia dictaduro
32 La Maga, Br.'e nos Aires. 16 dr; Junia de 1993. 11.
33 Roberto Plate, cscrito para Ia just1ficaci6n de Ia obra presentacla previa mente aiiTDT
 Hombre desnudo, pol los en llamas: Una breve historia del arte de performance en Brasil
Claudia Calirman
"'d Ocurri6 el 12 de agosto de 1965, a un ana del comienzo de Ia brutal dictadura
militar que goberno Brasil de 1964 a 1985. Bailarines de samba descendian del
Cerro de Mangueira, Ia fa vela o barriada mas antigua de Rio de Janeiro. Cinco de
elias vestran los legendarios Parangoles de Helio Oiticica - una serie de mantas
multicolores con varias capas- y estaban listos para entrar en los sa Iones del
Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ). La ocasion era Ia
inauguracion de Ia muestra Opinion 65 (Opiniao 65) en el museo. 1Sin ninguna
sanci6n oficial, Oiticica decidio hacer el debut de sus Parangoles, llevando a los
miembros de Iaescuela de samba de Mangueira a realizar una presentacion en el
museo. La idea de los Parangoles era que debian ser experimentados como
situaciones vivas, ya que solo se completaban con el cuerpo del participante y
cuando se incorporaban al movimiento del mismoz
Pero las elites blancas yde clase media alta que dominaban el museo no estaban
listas para absorber ese espectaculo Seg[m el artista Rubens Gerchman
Era Ia primera vez que Ia gente comun entraba en el Museu de Arte
Moderna de Rio de Janeiro Nadie sabra si Oiticica era un genio o un
loco ... Entr6 en el museo con los miembros del barrio de Mangueira y
todos lo siguieron lntentaron expulsarlo, pero Oiticica comenzo a gritar
que las personas negras no pod ian entrar a/ museo yque eso era racismo.
Despues de ser expulsado. Oiticica se dirigio a/ jardin del museo,
acompaiiado del publ ico que ya estaba dentro del mismo 3
Opinion 65 fue Ia primera exposici6n en Ia cual/os artistas plasticos responclian
a Ia dictadura justa clespues del golpe de estado de 1964. Dernostro que Ia
experimentacion artisticaestaba cada vez mas vinculada con el papel del individuo
en Ia sociedad, tanto social como politicamente. Tambien cambia el estatus del
MAM-RJ de una instituci6n elitista a un espac io que atraia estudiantes e
intelectuales. Asi, a partir de mediad as de los sesenta, Ia cafeteria del Museu de
Arte Moderna se convirti6 en ellugar donde los artistas de vanguardia de Rio de
Janeiro se reunian e intercambiaban ideas.
Estas discusiones fructificaron significativamente en las exposiciones que siguieron
a Opinion 65, tales como Opinion 66(Agosto. 1966) y NuevaObjetividad Brasiler)a
(Abri/6-30. 1967). en Ia que Oiticica mostr6 su sem inal penetrable Tropiccilia
El festival de peformances Arte en-tierra. Un mes de artc ptiblico (Arte no Atcm
-urn fvles de Arte Ptiblin ) en Rio de J;111r.iro. que sigui6 a Opini6n65 en1968 (6-
28 de julio). se convir.i6 en un evento decisivo p ra esla tendencia artistica.
poniendo en tela de juicio tccnicJs tradicionales como Ia pimura y Ia escultura,
rebasando los lirnites del espacio del museo e incorporando al pLiblico en el
proceso artistico El festival consisti6 en una serie de eventos de arte publico
curados par Frederico Morais, los cuales tuvieron Iugar en un parque en las
instalaciones del MAM-RJ'
Arte no Aterra fur, un . especie de happening cnorme patrocinado par el peri6clico
0 Diario de Notfcias(Rio cle Joneiro) Suprincipnl atracci6n fue un evento publico
coordinado par Oiticica y titulado Apocalij:wp6tcse. que tuvo Iugar los domingos
par Ia tarde en el Parque de Flamengo ' Apocal!pop6tese es un neologismo
portugues que combina las palabras "apocalipsis" e "hip6tesis "Entre los arlistas
que participaron en este evento estaban Antonio Manuel. Lygia Pape, Jackson Ribeiro
y Roberto Lanari. entre otros. John Cage asisti6 de incognito y fue identificado mas
tarde a !raves de fotografias •
Apocalrpop6tese consisti6 en varios eventos artisticos que se realizaron
sirnultaneamente y que aparenternente no ten ian nada en corntm Iuera de requerir
Ia participaci6n de los espectadores" Oiticica estaba al centro del movirniento cle
250
Ia contracultura en Rio de Janeiro y sus ideas sabre Ia integracion de Ia obra d
arte a Ia participacion del publico atraian a los artistas jovenes como Antonie
Manu~ I. Manuel habra conocido aOiticica en el MAM-RJ en 1967. Apesar de Ia~
d1ez anos que los separaban, mmed1atamente formaron una fuerte amistad.
En Apocalipop6tese, Manuel mostr6su serie Urn as calientes( Urnas Ouentes, 1968) 10
Consistian en veinte cajas selladas que contenian lotos otextos relacionados con Ia
violencia en las calles que habian sido tornados de periodicos de Ia epoca 0 de
archivos fotograticos. El contenido de cada caja era diferente y cada caja debra ser
abierta par el publico con un martil/o, Iacual implicaba un acto relativamentebrutal.
Oiticica se intereso en una imagen en particular d,e las Urnas calientes de Manuel.
Era Ia imagen de un nino famel ico de Biafra en Africa Despues de ver esta obra
Oiticica invito a Manuel a colaborar con e/ en Ia creacion de Parangole Nirvana'
1968. Oiticica cre6 Ia estructura de este Parangole clandole el titulo a Ia obra y
Manuel coloc61a imagen de/nino de Biafra en e1. 11
En el evento Apocalipop6tese, Lygia Pape mostr6 su obra El huevo(O Ova, 1968)
grandes estructuras cubicas (no ovoides) de madera cubiertas con una membrana
de plastico. De dentro de estas fragiles cajas sal i6 una escuela de samba
rompiendo las cajas, bailando y tocando musica en una analog Ia del naci111iento.1;
Rogerio Duarte contrat6 a un adiestrador de perros para el evento que trajo
ani males a/ parque y los adiestr6 frente a/ pCiiJiico Ouiza no par cas ualid~d. el dia
despues de Ia performance de Duarte, los period icos publicaron un articulosabre
el usa de perros policia en las protestas ptiblicas contra el regimen militar "nlas
calles de Rio de Janeiro.
AI desafiar al arte tradicional y las instituciones artisticas en vigencia, Ia~ a11istas
pretend ian romper con estructuras anticuadas yafirmar su inclividualidad ye/derecho
a Ia expresi6n propia en un momenta represivo de Ia historia brasileiid. En e/ XIX
Salao de Arte fvloderna en el MAM-RJ en 1970, un salon anual patrocinado par el
Ministerio de Cultura y Educaci6n de Brasil, Manuel decidi6 presentarse a5i mismo
como Iaobra de arte. En e/ formula riode envio de Ia obra, Manuel dio las dimensiones
de su cuerpo como las medic/as de "Ia obra". Manuel dec/ar6 que. siendu ~u cuerpo
una de las abras de arte, tenia rlerecho apennanecer en e/ rnuseo con todaslas otras
obras enviadas al concurso hasta que el jurado decicliera cuales serian acr·rtadas:
"lntente pennanecer duranteIJ selecci6n de las ohraspresentaclasal juro:!r:, '. :1 que,
sienclo Ia obrad8 arte en si. yn teniaclerrchoaqueclarme ahi hasta ser juzq;· 1:1 Pero
el jurado me picli6 queme retirt sc y se neg6 a aceptarme comn obra de a:'-; "11
PresenlcH su propio Luerpo como una o!Jra de artc era una manera para L!, l ·!!de
enfrentarse aI Jurado ycuestionar IauriJitrariedac/ de las reg las deselecr. .)· de las
e
abras. El Cuerpo es Ia ObraI0 Corpo c1 Obra) era una obra extrana e in<: 1"Jrada
para un salon de arte, alga parecido a/ gesto de Duchamp en su Fuente En Ia
tradicion duchampiana. Manuel tambien cuestiono el papel de las institucir 'I;S de
arte, con sus practicas excluyentes y sus actitucles convencionales.
El jurado se neg6 a aceptar 3 Manuel como ohra cle arte. declarando que e! IW '~eo
no tenia condiciones apropiadas para mantenerlo hasta cl dia de Ia exposic r,, sin
mencionar Ia posibilidad de alimentarlo y sustentarlo hasta el final de Ia mi :- ~1\J ;s A
pesar de ser rechazado par el juraclo. Manuel asisti6aIa inauguraci6n de Ia llJU stra
como invitado del museo. pero se disgust6 cuando Ia gente comenzo aapunirr hacia
el diciendo "rechazadn. rechazado, recllazado." Manuel responcli6 quitandose Ia ropa.
Cuando Manuellleg6 a/ tercer pi so del museo, se subi6 a un parapeto asiendose
de un tuba paralelo a Ia escalera. Abajo, en el mezanine, el publico que 1/egaba
pilra In inaugurar.i6n del salon qued6 escanrlalizado. Manuel intento hu ir,
refugiandose en Ia casa de su amigo. el critico de arte Mario Pedrosa La policia
inmccliatamente clausur(J Ia exposicionluego del desafio espontaneo de ~. !aJ 11el.
 cci6n de Manuel fue inesperada, improvisada e irreverente. Su intencion era
L~:respuesta c6micae inmediata a_ surechazo par parte del sal_on yfueel resul~ado
~ na acto impulsivo de trasgres1on. Su performance espontaneo se conv1rt1o en
eufmbolo de resistenciaen contra de las norm as no cuestionadas de los sal ones
~~ sarte y exposiciones en Brasil, asf como en contra de Ia falta de criterios
coherentes en relacion a Ia censura de las artes par parte de Ia d1ctadura mll1tar.
L intervenci6n nudista de Manuel en Ia inauguracion del XIX Salao de Arte
~oderno fue alabada par Mario Pedrosa como un "ejercicio experimental de
libertad "15 Esta frase fue acufiada par Pedrosa en 1~70 17 La uso para describir
racticas artfsticas no onentadasal mercado. Se refena al arte perecedero que no
~odfa presentarse como mercancfa a Ia sociedad de consumo, sino q~e, al contra rio,
consistfa en acciones y gestos colect1vos creados par Ia 1mag1nac1on. Los art1stas
que le inte1 esaban a Pedrosa concebfan el arte no como un producto terminado
sino como una propuesta abierta, una situacion para ser vivida oexperimentada 1
AI quitarse Ia ropa enel museo, Manuel tambien expuso Ia vu l ner~bi lidad de su cuerpo
alas inseguridades provocadas par las fuerzas de Ia repres10n AI comentar los
mecanismos de poder usados sabre el cuerpo en Vigilar ycastigar Nacimiento deIa
prisi6n (19751. Michel Foucault dec lara que Ia amenaza de Ia tortura es uno. de los
principales instrumentos us~dos para obl1gar a los llld1v1duos aacatar los reg1menes
disciplinarios, volv1endo doclles y obed1entes a qUienes son somet1dos a esta
amenaza'' Segun Foucault, "el cuerpo esta directamente involucrado en un campo
de poder; lasrelaciones de poder tienen un control inmediato sabre el; Ia conforman,
lo marcan, loadiestran, Ia torturan, Ia obligan arealizar tareas, ejecutar ceremonias,
emitir signa .";" Par Ia regular el cuerpo se vuelve el principal objeto de Ia apresion
en regfmenespoliticos represivos. El cuerpo desnudo de Manuel mostr6 su fragilidad
decara alosmecanismos de poder usados par el estado en esa epoca.
Laexhibicirn del cuerpo de Manuelfue Ia trasgres i6n no premeditada de un tabC1,
par Ia cual se volvio una presentacion aun mas contundente del cuerpo como
escultura viva en una pose antiheroica. Como observ6 Oiticica en su famoso
ensayo "Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade" (Esquema general de Ia nueva
abjetividad), el espfritu de Ia nueva vanguardia brasilefia se resumfa basicamente
en el sigue;itelema: "Oa Adversidade Vivemos I "(" iVivimos de Ia Adversidacll ") 1
AI subir,c ;' parapeto del MAM-RJ y sostenerse de un tuba con una mana
mientras ~ . end fa el otro brazo al aire, Manuel parecia como si enarbolara una
bandera i1· )ible con el lema do Oiticica grabado. AI presentarse como una
escultura· :, , Manuel personificaba las palabras profeticas de Oiticica.
Losunicos Jocumentos que sobreviven del perlomance de Manuel en el MAM-RJ
fueron los fotos tomadas par periodistas Sin embargo, dos meses despues de
que El Cuerpo es Ia Obra fue rechazado par el salon, Manuel cre6 Ia instalaci6n
Corpobra, 1970. Para transformar un performance elfmero en un objeto de arte
permanen ~ . ronstruy6 unacaja rectangular con las dimensiones de una persona,
con paja r 1id pa1te inferior y plexiglas en el !rente, imitando una caja usada para
almace1L ·, ''ansportar arras 'ie artc.
La caja C[' , ·~n ra una fotogralfa en blanco y negro del performance de Manuel en
Ia escaler': del MAM-RJ Una tirade carton con el letrero "Corpobra" cubrfa sus
genitales como una barra negra de censura. Oetras de Ia caja, un mecanismo de
cuerdas J,ermitfa al publico revelar el cuerpo desnudo de Manuel. Este juego
ingeniosod ~ cubrir y descubrir, esconder y revelar afirm6 el papel de Manuel como
autor de una legftima obra de arte. El desaffo a las convenciones de Ia exposici6n
publica del cuerpo masculino en este acto de Manuel era un eco de una acci6n del
artista Fl- ·~de Carvillho, ~uien catorce ililos antr.s (ell Rcle octubre de 1956) se
habra paseado par Ia concurrida Avenida Pau lista en Sao Paulo, usando un
irreverent, atuendo disehado por 61 mismo que inclufa un sombrero veraniego, una
minifalda y unas medias de red. Carvalho querfa crear una nueva moda para los
hombres de negocios de los tr6picos, desarticulando las normas comunmente
aceptadas en el disefio de modas sabre las distinciones entre los generosn Esta
provocaci6n fue reconocida como el primer evento de arte de performance en Brasil.
Posteriormente, el arte de performance se desarrollo de muchas maneras en Brasil.
convirtiendose en un area fascinante que perturbo las estructuras existentes.
Algunas de sus manifestaciones fueronlas capas de orientacion objetual llamadas
Parangoles de Oiticica, Ia exposicion del propio cuerpo de Manuel y mas adelante,
los experimentos de crear cuerpos colectivos realizados par Lygia Pape yLygia Clark.
En Divisor(1968). de Lygia Pape, Ia artista invitaba al publico ameter Ia cabeza en
agujeros que habfa cortado en una larga tela de algodon uniendolas como un
cuerpo comunita rio. Las experiencias multisensoriales de Lygia Clark cambiaban
el enfasis de Ia nocion clasica del arte como mercancia, enfatizando en su Iugar
las percepciones y respuestas del espectador En Caminando (Caminhando, 1963).
Clark simplemente invitaba al espectador a crear una cinta de Moebius. Le daba
las siguientes instrucciones "toma una banda de papel atada alrededor de un
libra, c6rta la, tuerce la y vuelvela a pegar para formar una cinta de Moebius."zJ El
artista par tanto se vuelve el habilitador del proceso creativo que solo se completa
con el recorrido del espectador.
La trayectoria de Clark Ia llev6 a una ruptura de las fronteras entre el arte y Ia
terapia, el ser y el otro, Ia interior y Ia exterior, Ia publico y Ia privado En Ia serie
de obras que llev6 a cabo en La Sorbonne, tales como Cuerpo colectivo (Corpo
Coletivo, 1972-1975). involucra a sus estudiantes en situaciones en las cuales ICJ
experiencia ya no era puramente visual, sino fundamenta lmente tactil.
En Baba Antropofagica (1973) losparticipantes que estaban de pie sostenfan carretes
de hila en sus bocasmientras poco apoco iban halando los hi loshasta atar el cuerpo
de otro participante que estaba en el pi so, creando una experiencia que simbolizaba
un v6mito colectivo. En Canibalismo(1973) un participante estaba acostado en el pi so
mientras el resto estaba a su alrededor con los ojos vendados, comunicandose unos
con otros solo a traves del tacto. Estos participantes comfan lrutas que estaban
colocadas dentro de los bolsillos del traje del participante acostado, a nivel del
abdomen, en un gesto antrop6fago Una vezque las frutas habfansido digeridas, lo
unico que queclaba era el recuerdo de Ia experiencia vivida por los participantesr:
Las metciloras del cuerpo tambien eran parte del vocabulario de los artistas que
optaron par quedarse en Brasil durante los aiios mas represivos de Ia dictadura
militar (1968-197 4) Artur Barrio convirtio sus Bultos ensangrentados (Trouxas
Ensanguentadas) en obras altamente viscerales que desafiaban alas fuerzas de Ia
represi6n en Brasil en esa epoca. Compr6 cuarenta ycuatro Iibras de carney huesos
en un matadero y los envolvi6 con tela ycuerdas para fonnar Bultos ensangrentados.
Estas horrorizantes piezas eran ejemplos graticos de lo que parecfan ser restos de
personas torturadas por Ia dictadura. Aludfan a los miembros lacerados y cuerpos
mutilados encontrados en los rfos y canalesdedrenaje durante el gobierno militar
Esta pieza fue parte de Ia exposicion Del cuerpo a Ia tierra (Do Corpo aTt;rra), en
Ia cual los artistas fueron invitados a crear obras de ubicaci6n especffica
re lacionadas con el arte corpora l y obras usando tierra en el Parque Municipal de
Bela Horizonte, estado de Minas Gerais, en 1970.·'5
Los habitantes de Bela Horizonte tomaron estos bultos ensangrentados par cuerpos
humanos descua rtizados Su presencia en los espacios publicos sugeria Ia
vulnerabi lidad de Ia sociedad a manos del regimen represivo Tambien eran
consideradas como denuncia rle los crfmenes cnmetidos par los escuadrones de Ia
muerte en Brasil. Los Bultos ensangrentados se colocaronen rfos, canales de drenaje
y en las calles principales de Bela Horizonte -expuestas a Iavista del publico.
El fotografo Cesar Carneiro ayudo a producir los bultos y despues documento las
reacciones del publico, que fueron bastante intensas. Se calcula que cinco mil
personas las vie ron en el Parque Municipal de Bela Horizonte, un sitio popular de
recreo para Ia clase media y los trabajadores Cuando Ia policia y los bomberos
llegaron a examinarlos, un policia se tropezo con uno de los bultos de Barrio,
creando mas tension aun. AI final del dia, los bultos fueron deshechos y los huesos
fueron llevados a un laboratorio para ser analizados Casi todas de las acciones
de Barrio se realizaron de manera efimera, rapida e inesperada, enfatizando Ia
falta de permanencia y aludiendo a los aetas cometidos porIa guerrilla urbanaz6
Barrio no fue el unico artista de Ia exposicion en emplear simbolos de Ia muerte
para examinar cuestiones politicas. De hecho, Del cuerpo a Ia tierra contenia
muchas referencias mordaces a Ia dictadura brasileiia. Cildo Meireles, por
ejemplo, quemo pol los vivos para sugerir un para lela con Ia tortura y asesinato de
presos politicos, provocando indignacion y Iuria entre los politicos.
La instalacion de Meireles Tiradentes. Totem-Monumento para el Prisionero
Politico ITiradentes.· Totem-Monumento para oPrisioneiro Polftico. 1970), consistio
en una estaca madera de unos 8 pies de altura, con un term6metro en Ia punta
Diez gallinas vivas fueron atadas Ia estaca, fueron rociadas con gasolina y
quemadas Las gallinas fueron quemadas vivas, en un ritual cruel que representaba
Ia tortura y muerte de los presos politicos
En esta obra, Meireles tambien creo un paralelo entre Ia situacion politica de
Brasil en esa epoca, y las condiciones politicas durante Ia epoca colonial. Aludia
al martir de Ia independencia de Brasil, Joaquim Jose da Silva ''avier, tambien
conocido como Tiradentes-literalmente "qui en arranca dientes"-ya que ejercia
como dentista en su tiempo libre. Luego de ser acusado de ser ellider de una
conspiracion en contra de Ia Corona, Tiradentes fue colgado por los portugueses
el21 de abril de 1792. Su cuerpo fue descuartizado, y su cabeza fue expuesta en
Ia plaza principal de Duro Preto, Minas Gerais (Ia ciuclad donde residi6)
La fecha del performance de Meireles fue el 21 de abril, una festividad nacional en
Brasil, Ia celebracion de Ia lnconfidenciaMineira, Ia rebel ion mas importante, que clio
aBrasilia independencia de Por1ugal en 1789. Como resultado, Tiradentes se volvi6 un
heroe nacional. sin embargo el gobierno militar de 1970 intentaba cooptar esa
celebraci6n patri6tica al patrocinar Ia exposici6n Del cuerpo aIa Tierra. SegLHl Me irelc~
"La figura de Tiradentes estaba siendo usmla por el gobiernomilitar de una mzllleramuy
cfnica Tiradentes erA Ia antitesis del gobir.rno . Era clara Ia hipocre~ia cle sumaniohra
simbolica, y decidi crear una obra sabre esto." : La intencion de Meireles era evocar
el pasado atravesde supliciode Tiradentes para poner de relieve Ia situacicnrepresivil
1
del presente. Us6la memoria no solo para traer al presente un hecho histurico olvidado
tiempo atras, sino como una instigacion para actuar en el presente.
Metaforas y mensajes politicos tambien estaban presentes en las estampillas que
Thereza Simoes ueo cun inscripcioncs tal es como "SL,CIL"("Dirt}"), "PtuhiiJiLio"
("Verboten"). "Fragil" ("Fragile"). y 'ArtliD en Silecin'Tkt Silrntl(, un rslogan clc
Malcolm X) Simoes declar6 que "queria crear una situa c i6r~ irquictante" a! cumparar
las acciones de Ia dictadura militar en Brasil a! conflicto norteamericano en Vietnam
Lee Jaffe ejecut6 una obra originalmente concebida por Oiticicil para Ia exposici6n
Su pieza consistia en azucar arrojada sabre un camino de tierra. Antes de que las
hormigas pudieran devorar el azucar, Ia obra fue destruida por un tractor.:J Luis
Alphonsus Guimaraes utiliz6 napalm, que en esa epoca estaba siendo usado por los
Estados Unidos en Vietnam como arma para quemar y destruir una pancarta de 15
metros colocada sabre el pasta.
El clima cle miedo y terror creadu por el regimen rnil itar se vi urelralado ertla pieLa
El Sermon de Ia Montana, Fiat Lux(O Sermao da Montanha. Fiat Lux, 1973- 79)
Meireles concibio el proyecto en 1973, pero le llev6 seis anos realizarlo. La
instalacion finalmente se llev6 a cabo en una pequeiia galerfa universitaria
Candido Mendes, en lpanema, un barrio pudiente de Rio de Janeiro en 1979, el aii~
que se concedio Ia amnistia en Brasil a los opositores politicos del reg imen. El
Sermon de Ia Montana, Fiat Lux consistio en una exposicion de 126,000 cajas de
fosforos de Ia marca Fiat-Lux (Ia marca de fosforos mas popular en Brasil) Las
cajas de fosforos estaban acomodadas formando un gran cuba en el centro de Ia
galeria AI entrar a Ia galeria, el espectador sentia que sus zapatos rozaban el
papel de lija negro que cubria el suelo, imitando el sonido de que alga se quemaba
y creando aprension sabre un posible incendio. La escu ltura estaba rodada par
cinco actores vestidos de guardaespaldas, usando trajes y lentes oscuros para
evitar que los visitantes tocaran los fosforos, par miedo a que se produjese una
explosion. La presencia de los supuestos guardaespaldas tambien era opresiva
ya que se asemejaban a agentes secretos de Ia policia politica Para aumentar el
clima de intimidacion y vigilancia, las paredes estaban cubiertas de espejos
El control se perdi6 cuando el publico comenzo a tocar las cajas de f6sforos.
Los falsos agentes de seguridad llamaron a Ia policfa verdadera para obligar a!
p[rblico a evacuar Ia galeria :m Estaba previsto que El Sermon de Ia Montaiia, Fiat
Luxdurara 24 horas, pero solo duro unas pocas De Ia posible explosion de Ia galeria
a Ia transformaci6n del espacio en un Iugar con alto riesgo de incendio a Ia agresiva
presencia de los falsos guardias, todo en este performance operaba como metafora
de las ansiedades que experimentaba Ia sociedad brasileila en esa epoca.
En 1985, Brasil entro en una nueva lase democratica, dejanclo atras el estado de
terror y violencid que caracteriz6 a Ia dictadura militar Un artista de Ia nueva
generacion, Tunga, por ejemplo, continuo explorando las posibilidades del
performance de manera mas poetica, juguetona eimaginativa Su trabajo sepuede
relacionar a las implicaciones psicoanaliticas de las experiencias sensorraies de
Lygia Clark. En el performance Cap/lares Siamesas (Xifopagas Capilares, 1985),
dos gemelas de trece anos fueron unidas por una larga y enredada peluca rubia.
Estas patologicas gemelas se veian identicas y simetricas. pero nolo eran. La pieza
de Tunga aludia almundo de Ia representaci6n, donde significado ysignificante no
son Ia misma cosa. Colocadas laclo a lado, las imagenes como de sueho evocaban
distintos significaclos simb61icos, sin atenerse a una idea o narrativa fija La obra
de Tunga celebra el flujo dr Ia transformacion y constantementP fluctua er.trc las
ideas de Ia seducci6n Ia prohibici6n, el totemI' el tab[r.' ·
La seri e lin performancr;s, occiones c ll ewras y experimentos inter 'c:i-. ~' que
clnminaron el arte IJrasilerio de este pcrioclo va Oi'Sde el usa qu e I " _. ·~ :stas
hicieron de su propio cuerpo !Manuel) hasta !a utilizaci6n de los cucrr ri~ los
espectadores como receptores de Ia experiencia IOiticica, Clark, Papc). el L.1 fasis
en Ia materialidad visceral de los objetos (Barrio) oel usa de objetos co!no simple
media para producir Ia experiencia (Clark) Yasea en el sacrificio de an irr.al"s para
denunciar un estado de tortura (Meireles), en acciones callejeras que re ,,;lan Ia
violer1cia (Barrio), o en juegos de Ia irm;ginJci6n (Tunga). todos est·. C~ r t istas
co n ~ tituyc ron una fuerza liberadora queayudo a formar un vigoroso \' P • ri 11 !!Jlante
campo del performance ,nBrasil. Comodijo Oiticica "iVi imos de Ia M . idadl"
 L exposici6n Opiniao 65tuvo Iugar del12 de agosto al12 de septiembre de 1965 en el 17 Mario Pedrosa, "A Bienal de Ca Para La" (La Bienal de Aqui para Alia) Este ensayo
1
~useu de Arte Mode rna do Rio de Janeiro. originalmente fue escrito por Pedrosa en Febrero de 1970 (Cabo Frio Rio de Janeiro).
publicado en Ferreira Gullar, Arte Brasi/eira Hoje(Rio de Janeiro PazeTerra. 1973). 1- 64.
Helio Oiticica, "Anota~oes sabre o Parangole." Publicado originalmente par el artista y
Mas tarde re publicado en Mario Pedrosa. Polftica das Artes, ed. Otilia Arantes (Sao Paulo
.2 irculado en forma de mime6grafo con motivo de Ia exposici6n Opiniao 65(Rio de Janeiro
Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1995). 283-284.
~useu de flrte Moderna, 1965) Reimp!eso en Aspiro ao grande /abirmto, Luciano
Figueiredo, Lygia Pape, and Waly Salomao. eds. (RIO de Janerro Edrtora Rocco, 1986). 18 Rina Carvajal, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom (Los Angeles Museum of
7
a--n lmpreso en ingles en He/io Oiticica. cat. (Rotterdam Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art. 1999), 35-36.
Contemporary Art, 1992). 93-96. Reimpreso en ingles como "Notes Concerning Parangole" 19 Michel Foucault, V;gilar ycastigar Nacimiento de Ia prisi6n. (Mexico Siglo XXI. 1976). 25.
Mari carmen Ramirez. ed , Helio Oiticica. The Body of Color, cat. (Houston The Museum
of Fine Arts, 2007). 298. 20 Ibid.
Frederico Morais, ed. Opiniao 65, cat. (Rio de Janeiro Galeria de Arte BanerJ, 1985) Este 21 Helio Oiticica, "Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade" se publico por primera vez en el
3 catalogo de Ia e. posicion, Nova Objetividade Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro Museu de Arte
catalogo fue publ icado en ocasion de rehacerse Iaexposicion Opiniao 65 en Ia Galeria de
· Arte Banerj, Rio de Janeiro (Agosto 1985) para celebrar su vigesimo aniversario. La Mode rna, 1967) Republicado en Guy Brett [et all. Helio Oiticica (Rotterdam Witte de
exposicion fue organizada par el critico Frederico Morais. Opiniao 65 se rehi zo. esta vez With, 1993; Minneapol is Walker Art Center. 1992). 11 0-120. Selecciones en Conceptual
organizadapar los criticos Wilson Coutinho y Cristina Aragao, en el Centro Cu ltural Banco Art A Critical Anthology, Alezander Iberra and Blake Stimson. eds , (Cambridge MIT Press.
do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (Mayo 17- Julio 16, 1995) para conmemorar el30 aniversario de 2000). 40-42.
Ia exposici6n 8riginal. 22 Flavia de Carvalho escribio una columna en el Oiario de Sao Paulo de marzo a octubre de
1956 donde comentaba asuntos de moda. Ver Luz Camillo Osorio. Flavia de Carvalho
4 El penetra !e Ttopicalia (1967) consiste de dos gabinetes de madera. llamados penetraveis
(penetrables). IIenos y rodeados degravilla, arena. plantas tropicales. loros vivos dentro de (Sao Paulo Cosac & Naify Edi~oes, 2000). 43-44.
una jaula, poemas, cortinas hechas de coloridas tel as plasticas y alfombras. todo lo cual 23 Lygia Clark, Livro-Obra (Rio de Janeiro. 1983) Reimpreso en el catalogo de exposici6n
18 cuerda los cspacios de los barrios de chabola de Rio de Janeiro. La principal estructura Lygia Clark (Barcelona Fundacio Antoni Tapies. 1998), 151-52, yen October The Second
invita al participante a entrar en un pasaje oscuro y laberintico al fina l del cual hay un Decade, 1986-1996(Cambridge, Mass .. MIT Press, 1997). 39.
televisor en blanco y negro encendido. El segundo penetrable es una estructura abierta
que conti ene Ia inscripcion "Pureza e urn mito" (La pureza es un milo) 24 Lygia Clark. da obra ao acontecimento. Somas o mode/a. A voce cabe osopro. cat. Suely
Rolnik y Corinne Diserens. orgs. (Nantes Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2005: Sao
5 Nota del editor La palabra "aterro" parece utilizarse aqui en un sentido ambivalente. Puede Paulo Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo. 2006)
referir a una porci6n de tierra. especre de monliculo, asi como al terror.
25 Do Cor{lo aTerra (Del cuerpo a Ia tierra) fue un evento de 5 dias curado par Frederico
6 Frederico Mora is, Cronologia das artes p/asticas no Rio de Janeiro, 1816-19941Rio de Morais en el Parque Municipal de Bela Horizonte. Minas Gerais. del17-21 de abril. 1970.
Janeiro TopBooks, 1995). 30 1. No hubo catalogo . La exposicion fue patrocinada por Hidrominas. una compaiiia
7 Ibid. El titL''o Apocaltpop6tese fue sugerido por el poeta Rogerio Duarte para transmitir Ia hidroelectrica cuyo socio mayoritario es el estado de Minas Gerais. Todos los artistas
idea de un "objeto probable." invitados a participar recibieron una carla oficial del gobierno otorgandoles Ia libertada
de e1ecutar sus ohras en el espacio publico Ver Frederico Morais. Do Corpo ,7 Terra. Um
8 Helio Oitici c:!, "Apocalipopotese" fue publica do en Figueredo, Pape, and Salomao. eds. Marco Radical Na Arte Brasileira (Bela Horizonte Itau Cultural, 2002). s/p
Aspiro ao yunde /abirinto. 128-139. Este libra contiene una seleccion de textoo. escritos
por Oiticicaentre 1954 y 1969. 26 Claudia Calirman, "Artur Barrio Ephemeral Art and Decomposing Materials," exh. cat. Artur
Barrio. Actions After Actions (Phi ladelphia Moore College of Art & Design, 2007). 22-29.
9 Morais. Cwndogfa. 301.
27 Gerardo Mosquera, Paulo Herkenhoff yDanCameron. eds, "Gerardo Mosquera in Conversation
10 Urnas que, te ~ de Antonio Manuel fue mencronacla por Oiticrca en "Apocalipop6tese". \'lith Cildo Meireles," Ciido Mrirelcs(London Phaidon Press LimitPd, 1999). 15.
11 La primer,· , ' , que Oiticica menciono e! P:;!,rngule P22 Cape 18 Nirvana. Pn colaboraci6n
28 Declaracr6n de Thereza Srmoes en Morai s. Fredmir.o. eeL, Dcpoimento dr uma gerJ~ao,
con Anton' --~ lnuel fue en el c~till o~u de su c x po~ i c i 6n Whitrclrilpel f.l{'erimeqt, que
196'9- 1970. cat.l fi io eli:: Janeiro LJalena de Arte 8dneq, 1 ~861. s/p
tuvo Iugar ·_· , '.\'hitechapol Gallery, Londre5, 1969.
29 Fr ed eric~ ivlorcirs. Do Corpo aTerra. s.'p.
12 Lygia Pap,:.: ,·J de Januiro Funartc. 19831. -16. p,,l, una chcu:;iun de Ia obra {) {), a (1 968).
de Lygia Pa. , , ver Helio Oiticica. "Eqg," L;g1a Pare Gihca de Tocaia (Sao Paulo Co sac & 30 Crldo fv1 cireles, en trevrsta par Ia autora, Rio de Janeiro. 7 de agosto, 2002.
Naily, 200f:J. 201-303: y Guy Brett, 'Lrfc Strategies lJ~ erv ie w oncl Selection." Out of 31 Claudra Calinnan. "Tunga." Art in America. No.5, (mayo 2007). 19 .-191
Actions. Bc';1een Performanrc and thr Ob1eCI. 19~901979, Russel l Ferguson, ed. (Los
Angeles Tl '~ fvluseum of Contcmporar1· Art. 1998). 208
13 Lucia Carneiro e Ileana Pradi lla. AntG'Jio Manuel. Palavra do Artt,ta (Rio de Janeiro.
Lacerda Editr·ra. 1999). 39.
14 LaFuente (,"auntain) de Marcel Duchamp fueenviada par el artista aIa primera exposici6n de
Ia Americl' '':<ety of Independent ,\,tistsI lue\'01 Yo'k. abril dr. 1917) hJjoel pseud6nimode
R.Mutt.
15 Antonio ManJf:; l, entrevista porIa aut ora. Rio de Janeiro. 22 de agosto. 2002.
16 Publicado ur Ia seccion dominical Arte y Entretenimiento. del peri6dico 0 Jornai(Rio de
Janeiro). ro 'l motivo de Ia "Exposi~ao de /\ntonio Manuel de Zero as 24 Hora s" (15 de
julio de 1973). 2. Fue una entrevista realizada por el critico Mario Pedrosa con Antonio
Manuel, HL~JO Denizart y Alex Varela en Ia casa de Pedrosa , poco despues de que Manuel
se desnudara durante Ia apertura del XIX Salon . La entrevista fue transcrita de una
grabacion El termino acuiiado par Pedrosa, "ejercicio experimental de libertad," se
convirtio en .:imholo de iiclos mtistims espont~neos en rontril de Ia rerrcsr6n
 El arte de los rincones: Notas sobre las experiencias no-objetuales en Venezuela
Gabriela Rangel
Para Adriano, In Memoriam
I. Desde Ia trastienda (del museo)
Casi veinte anos median entre dos momentos que han determinado un Iugar
incierto para el arte no-objetuai' y las modalidades conceptuales en Venezuela,
diluyendo su historia y acrecentando Ia excentricidad de su campo dentro del
discurso de las artes visuales contemporaneas de ese pafs. Uno corresponde al
happening Homenaje a Ia Cursilerfa, organizado en 1961 por el grupo Neo Dada El
Techo de Ia Ballena, y el otro se situa en 1980, a partir de siete performances que
Marco Antonio Ettedgui rea lizara dentro del espacio dedicado a este tipo de arte
experimental que el artista denomino Arteologfa. Ambos eventos ocurrieron en dos
garajes ubicados en lugares distintos de Ia ciudad de Caracas. El primero congrego
a Ia izquierda cultural de Ia capita l, reunida en el cobertizo de una casa particular
en Ia urbanizacion el Conde para celebrar una corrosiva satirapolftica dirigida contra
el statu quo. Par contraste, los eventos de Ettedgui ocurrieron en Ia tienda de
Lamparas Araya en Las Mercedes, barrio de clase media alta donde acudieron
cientos de espectadores caraquenos acaso atrafdos porIa novedad de este tipo de
arte emergente, o quizas movilizados par el magnetismo del joven artista.
El tiempo transcurrido entre ambos eventos, su bipolaridad ideol6gica y su caracter
impugnador parecieran fundirse diacr6nicamenteen un solo Iugar en Ia trinchera
de rincones y trastiendas, como lo expresara el artista Marco Antonio Ettedgui.
Este texto intenta exam inar un conjunto de acciones y eventos que han sido
obliterados par Ia hi storiograffa oficia l venezolana, dominada desde Ia decada de
1960 par una matrizformalista iniciada par Alfredo Boulton, que se proyecta en el
presente objetando Ia validez del arte corporal ydel performance como fenumenos
hfbridosyconstitutivos del posmodernismo al subvertir Ia idea moderna de que Ia
estructura formal de Ia obra, recortada del contexto, revela un significado establez
Ariel Jimenez ha sostenido que Ia historia escrita par Boulton "termina siendo
asimilada (par Ia ausencia, en pa rte, de una historiograffa que abarcara y
comprend iera a los mas j6venes) a Ia historia del arte en Venezuela, de donde
quedan naturalmente excluidas las tendencias "no pict6ricas"" de las decadas de
1960 y 1970. En este sentido, conviene tener presente una observaci6n de Maria
Elena Ramos "si bien Ia preocupacion estetica, formal y linguistica es muy
importante en eli as, el performance en Venezuela, como en America Latina, tiene
unmarcaclo interes critico en los proces0s sociales, irleosincraticos y politicos"
Si en principia hemos propuesto situar Ia produccion de happenings, performances
yacciones valiendonos de los hitos hist6ricos clonclc Ia critica oficial ha condensarlo
Ia produccion de los eventos y las obras mas irnportantes de arte no-objetua l,
creemos que estos solocumplenlaluncion practica de aportar elementos factuales
que posibilitanla elaboraci6n de una prirnera hip6tesis para este te to adiferencia
de Ia atenci6n critica que las rnanilestaciones de este tipo han tenido en los Estados
Unidos, Europa yen paises del cono sur como Argentina, Chiley Brasil; en Venezuela
las artesno-objetuales han sido yson sistematica mente excluidasdel discurso visual
venezolano, el cual confina su producci6n a un parentesis. A proposito de esto
delorrnacion historiografica, Juan Calzadilla advirti6 "lo segregacion lacilita, asi
pues, Ia expedici6n de un carnet de identidad siempre transitorio (__ .) El supuesto
de que no debe considerarse abra plastica sino aIa que puede ser circunscrita a los
terminos de un objeto material, fijo o m6vil en el espacio pero en todo caso
determinado par una estructuraexterna al creador, se ha reflejado en Ia negativa, par
parte del publico y aun mas de artistas y criticos, a aceptar estas manifestaciones
de artecorporal en el seno de los movimientos plasticos institucionalizados (.. )"
No es casual que las epis6dicas resurrecciones publicas que han experimentado
los eventos, acc iones y situaciones del arte no-objetual desde Ia decada de 1960
liasla Ia feclia ocunieran enla sal a de Ia FundacionMendoza, Ia Libreria Cru?del
Sur, Ia Sala Ocre, Ia galeria 1-111gel Boscan, el salon Arturo Michelena, el Ateneu
de Caracas, el Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, el Museo de Arte
Contemporaneo Francisco Narvaez de Porlamar, Ia Sala de Ia Gobernacion de
Caracas, Ia sala alterna de Ia Galerfa de Arte Nacional (GAN) y Ia sala de teatro
Juana Sujo; espacios no convencionales entonces administrados par artistas 0
museos coyunturalmente abiertos a ini ciativas experimentales mas alia de Ia
pintura ode Ia escultura_6 La misma suerte ha corrido el conceptualismo, condenado
a Ia amnesia o a Ia historia oral de sus protagonistas Otro rasgo que reitera Ia
naturaleza hfbrida del arte no-objetual es su alianzaorganica con el teatro, Ia danza
Ia musica y el cine, produciendo colaboraciones multidisciplinarias que lo situa~
Iuera del ambito del museo y par ende del campo estetico considerado por el
paradigma teleol6gico de Boulton.
Pero, a pesar de Ia dificultad de in se~ci6n de los happening, performances y
aCCiones en espac1os 1nst1tUclonales, publ1cos o pnvados, dada Ia radi ca lidadde
sus propuestas ode Ia inestabilidad de los circuitos alternativos dondo estos
eventualmente se mostraron, existe en Venezuela una producci6n importante de
obras y de exhibiciones que abarca desde los proto-happenings de El Techo de Ia
Ballena, los happeningsprecursores de Rolando Pefia, los performances tempranos
de Diego Barboza, Antoni eta Sosa, Claudio Perna, Angel Vivas Ariasy Pedro Teran
el espectaculo multidisciplinario Imagen de Caracas,l los eventos de Yeni y Nan:
Marco Antonio Ettedgui, Carlos Zerpa y Juan Loyola, hasta las acciones mas
conceptuales propuestas par Alfred Wenemoser. El cuerpo de obras producidas
a Ia largo de cuatro decadas, reducidas aun parentesis, forma parte deun discurso
denso y complejo que da cuenta de las contradicciones de un pais cuyo proceso
de modernizaci6n llev6 a "una de las mas violentas modificaciones que seconozcan
en America Latina, que practicamente parte en dos periodos a su historia, archiva
su pasado y, sin suficientes bases educativas, se Ianza tumultuosa a Ia conquista
de Iamodernidad. El efecto predecible habria de ser un desquiciamiento deval ores,
Ia parcial destrucci6n de los heredados y Ia imposibilidad para rearticular nuevas
y coherentes, sabre todo habida cuenta de los rasgos de una sociedad burguesa
cuyos elementos dominantes se enriquecen en un periodo diez veces rn nor que
el de los mode los burgueses europeos del siglo XIX".·
Se ha sostenido en diferentes aproximaciones al t6pico que el ciclo d' mayor
intensidad y de apoyo ofic ial que tuvo el arte no-objetual ocurri6 .n !r1s afios
ochenta y que este se refleja en la s exposiciones Arte BI/Jcdo (Gal eri.·. , 1 ~ Arte
Nacional, 1980). Ia se lecci6n venezola na para Ia XVI Bienal de SdoPac · :' 981) y
Acciones frentc a Ia plaza(FUNDARTE, 1981 ). No obstante, los hechos dL., ~~stran
Ia dcbilidadde esta suposici6n ill constJtar queestas prli ctica~. JLiil en" ' ~ ·2fiodo
seiialado, no aseguraron el respaldo sistematico de los museos nacic: . r ni el
compromiso de coleccionistas privados o el interes de galerias de ark 'u· ales a
lo largo del tiempo ··Sin embargo, su rnera formulacion indica que al r:~.puntar
Ia decada de 1980 las artes no-objetuales, en efecto, tuvieron unJ "e los
momentos de mayor efervescencia y vitalidad en el pais ·1 No obstante. !1l ,istoria
de estas practicas no puede limita rse a eventos o situaciones que : ,,·, .til un
nurnero irnportante de trabajos en un solo movimiento, sino a a':';; .,,es o
acontecimientos dispersos que han contribuido a Ia con stru~ci 6n de L , J .ursa
visual descentrado y excentrico del pa radigma moclerno
Es el caso de Imagen de Caracas, even to multidisciplinario concebido £111,c> 1966
y 1968 par el pintor y escen6grafo Jacobo Borges. Este happening c n·tituy6
un excepciona l experimento, rara vez mencionado como preludi o ara el
arte contemporaneo venezolano, desarrollado a Ia largo de Ia decada de 1970
en las propuestas conceptualistas de Claudio Perna, Hector Fuenmayor, Marfa
Zabala, William Stone, Eugenio Espinoza, el salon de arte emergente Once Tipos
y experiencia s que exploraban las relaciones entre publico, artistn y vida
coticliana. Entre estas ultimas merece rnencionar El Autobus o Las senJ<J!·,unes
perdidas del hombre
 Iadecada de 1970, Margarita D'Amico_ habra realizado exposic i o~es en las
~nales el happening y el performance hab1an mut~do en p1ezas de v1de~ mono
au no narrativas o comb1 naban acc10nes y mus1ca en v1vo con 1magenes
1
dan~deo pre-grabadas ocon feedbackpresentadas en el Festival de Vfdeo Arte en
~ VIcien creado Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas (1975). Ia colectiva
~O~rtistas Venezolanos Hayen el Centro de Arte yComunicacion de Buenos Aires
(CAYC, 1979) y Ia Muestra de Vfdeo del Festival de Caracas (Universidad Central
d Venezuela, 1979) Estas expenenc1as precursoras mostraban una estrecha
c~laboracion entre cineastas de Super 8mm como Carlos Casti lloy Diego Rlsquez,
artistasy actores de teatro expenmenta I.
Cabe entonces preguntarse LPOr que Iaproduccion mas significativa de performances,
happennings y acciones tiende a ser encapsulada al inicio de Ia decada de 1980,
el perlodo mas conformista de Ia h1storia vene_zolana yen el_umbral de Ia primera
crisis economicasevera que conoc1era Ia nac1on desde los anos tremta?
Laindiferencia de Ia institucion del arte en Venezuela hacia estas practicas se
evidencia hoy en Ia dispersion de los archivos y las fuentes documentales que
preservan una memoria de las obras y las situaciones realizadas, poniendo en
peliyro su integndad. La margmal 1dad del arte no-objetual se hace aun mas
patenteen fa accidentada trayectoria de artistas activos en el pals desde Ia decada
de1960, cuyo radical empeno en este tipo de arte efimero, no comercial que
explora los limites de Ia subjetividacl desde el cuerpo, 12los rituales populares y Ia
fusion con Iarea l; ies ha confinado a una suerte de ostracismo cultural. Por otra
parte, el deceso prematuro de algunos de los pioneros del happening y del
performance ha ocasionado Ia perdida irreversible de una parte importante de Ia
historiade las aw ones que estos art1stas real1zaron tanto en Venezuela como en
. Europa o en los Estados Unidos. En este contexto, el registro documental de las
acciones realizadas por Diego Barboza, Alberto Brandt. Carlos Contramaestre,
Marco Antonio Ettedgui, Juan Loyola, Claudio Perna y Angel Vivas Arias no canto
conpolfticas de adquisicion de los museos nacionales o con apoyo privado para
garantizar su accesibilidad al publico y su conservacion en el tiempo.
Sibienel arte abstracto y el cinetismo han acumulado un corpus critico durante
mas decuatro ·1ecadas, el arte no-objetual y las modalidades conceptuales, en
cambia, care•:L " de una doxa que permita inscrilml os en u11 campo de
interpretacion i' ,,sam plio oestablecer un marco comparativo con lasexperiencias
regionales con: J ha ocurriclo con los happenings y performances surgidos en
Argentina, Ch ii· '. Brasi l durante las decadas de 1960, 1970 y 1980 1 ' El desarrollo
de estas modaldades en Venezuela tambien coincide con Ia aparicion de una
nuevageneradn de crit1cos y curadores entre los cuales destacan Margarita
D'Amico, Rober to Guevara, Maria Elena Ramos, Elsa Flores, Juan Calzadilla, Lu is
A. Duque, Al ej a~d ro Varderi y Juan CarlosPalenzuela, quienes interpretaron este
tipodeexpres;c!nes cfimeras en sincronia con el momenta de su aparici6n en
articulos y enslyos criticos publicados en Ia prensa naciona l. 1: No obstante, Ia
falta de publ i r;iunes especial1zadJs o perioclizaciones mas consistentes ha
imposibilitar:d '2 recepcion del arte no-objetual y el conceptualismo venezolano
en estudios · i;ublicaciones recientes producidos en los EEUU, Europa y
Latinoamerica d l las cuales estas practicas han sido recontextualizadas y
proyectadas l·o;ia un espectro global del arte conceptual y del feminisrno. •
Estetexto no pre tende hacer un recuento exhaustivo de las experiencias de arte
no-objetual en Venezuela, sino que propane reconsiderar un conJunto de trabajos
fundadoresdepracticas excentricas, Iarnayoriacriticas al proceso de modernizaci6n,
que no necesariamente trazan una progresion lineal subordinada al marco
predeterminarln nor las vanguarclias historicas europeas clesde Ia Bauhaus, Dada
Yel surrealismoo Ia recepcion de estas en Black Mountain College que se definen
como genealogra del performance descle una perspectiva norteamericana. 1'
En Venezuela los happenings, performances y acciones aparecen y desaparecen
desde yen los "rincones" vernaculos, rezagados del gran mito modernizador que
enmascara Ia vertiginosa expansion demogratica, Iamas iva concentracion urbana del
campo y Ia concomitante favelizaci6n de Ia ciudad, el analfabetismo, Ia economia
informal y las luchas sociales diferidas Todo ello presente en el pals desde Ia muerte
del dictador Juan Vicente Gomez en 1936 hasta Ia conso lidacion de Ia democracia
en 1958, en procesos desproporcionadamente acelerados por Ia riqueza petrolera
II. Obras no, experi encias
El Homenaje a Ia cursilerfa (1 961) del grupo El Tech a de Ia Ballena se situ a como
el primer happening celebrado en Venezuela 17 Este grupo, cuyos miembros eran
figuras emergentes de Ia plastica y Ia literatura que apostaban par Ia renovacion
de las letras y del arte, irrumpi6 vio lentamente en Ia escena cultural venezolana
como sintoma de un period a historico turbulento, el cual se inici6 al ser derrocada
Ia dictadura desarrollista del Marcos Perez Jimenez (1950 -1958). yse caracteriz6
por Ia consolidacion de una flamante democracia pronto amenazada par Ia
penetracion de las guerrillas diseminadas en Latinoamerica por Ia revolucion
cubana, AI ser uno de los principales productores mundiales de petrol eo y, por lo
tanto, un pais estrategico para los intereses econ6micos y politicos norteamericanos
durante Ia Guerra Frla, Venezuela se volcaba al comenzar Ia decada de 1960 hacia
el afianzamiento de un modelo constitucional bipartidista cuestionado desde su
genesis par amplios sectores de Ia izquierda nacionai. 1BDurante aquellos anos de
confrontacion entre diferentes fuerzas sociales y actores politicos, Ia abstraccion
geometrica se iba consolidando como un movimiento canonico del arte venezolano
despues del Proyecto de lntegraci6n de las Artes de Ia Universidad Central de
Venezuela del arquitecto Carlos Raul Villanueva, para luego agregar al arte cinetico
a partir del exito internacional alcanzado por Jesus Soto y Carlos Cruz-Diez. La
labor de promocion y difusion del arte moderno europeo yde las neo vanguardias
norteamericanas y latinoamericanas fue emprendida par el Museo de Bellas Artes,
dirigido por el critico Miguel Arroyo,19 antiguo miembro del grupo Los Disidentes zo
y mas adelante continuada par Sofia lmber2i Jesus Solo, entonces res idente en
Paris, mostro tempranamente sus simpatias hacia el art informel al participar en
Ia polemica exposicion Espacios Vivientes que organizaron ex miembros del grupo
Sardio, reagrupados en El Techo de Ia Ballena, en el Palacio de Bellas Artes de
Ma1acaibo (1960) Dicha muestra, cuya intencion eraromper filas con el movimiento
de Ia abstracci6n geometrica, complic6 Ia 16gica binaria y falsa s dicotomias que
caracterizaron al debate historico sobre figuraci6n y abstracci 6n que dividio a los
intelectuales y artistas venezolanos clesde Ia decada de 1950, liquidando aquellas
distinciones ideo logicas que situaban el arte progresista y revolucionario
exclusivamente dentro los confines del rea lismo social y del panfleto 2
Para Angel Rama, Ia violenta modernizaci6n que vivio Venezuela explicaria Ia
reaccion critica con Ia cual El Techo de Ia Ballena enfilo sus ataques contra las
costumbres provincianas y Ia moralidad catolica que aun dominaban Ia vida
caraquena de comienzos de Ia decadJ de 1960. Concebido como un acto
deliberadarnente provocador, el grupo tuvo Ia prevision de anunciar en su primer
manifiesto que no pretendia revivir las veladas del Cabaret Volta ire. Este
happening temprano constituyo un experimento de deslinde de Ia nocionmoderna
de autoria al ser concebido y presentado como una accion colectiva destinada a
unir el arte con Ia realidad. El Homenaje a Ia cursilerfa desplegaba un enorme
collage compuesto de pasajes de textos de escritores venezolanos consagrados,
recortes de prensa con noticias y fotografias de Ia alta polltica puestos a manera
de papel tapiz en una habitacion ycuyos fragmentos eran leldos par los miembros
del grupo mientras se obsequiaba "arte comestible" ofrecido al publico en
bandejas serviclas por Alberto Brandt' ; Un aiio mas tarde, el alcance pC1bl ico de
este happening fue sobrepasado con creces al realizar un golpe mas ambicioso,
el Homenaje a Ia Necrofilia Estelagro el objetivo de sacudir Ia opinion publica de
 Caracas con una "ambientacion" de Carlos Contramaestre realizada con obras
fabricadas con cadaveres de animales y vfsceras. las cuales comenza ron a
descomponerse con el paso de los dfas, forzando al Departamento de Salud
Publica del Ministerio de Sanidad a clausurarla.
El Techo de Ia Ballena, activo desde 1960 hasta 1968, coincidio con Ia segunda
etapa de modernizacion intensiva despues de Ia dictadura de Perez Jimenez, con
reformas educativas, construccion de viviendas populares y costosas obras de
infraestructura publica y privada No obstante, este perfodo estuvo acompaiiado
de un clima politico agitado por lasdivisiones ideologicas de Accion Democratica,
partido de gobierno desde 1959 hasta 1969, y por diversas insurrecciones militares,
huelgas y el ate ntado que sufriera el presidente Romulo Betancourt al comenzar
Ia decada. Esta crispacion articul o el perfi l de las agrupaciones intelectual es
surgidas en to rno a revistas tales como Sardio, Tabla Redonda y Cal. Adiferencia
deelias, El Techo de Ia Ballena era un movimientoplastico en igual proporcion que
literario y definfa en sus tacticas como una guerrilla cu ltural en un momenta de
gran represion militar en el pals debido a Ia aparicion de lasFuerzas Revolucionarias
de Liberac ion Nacional, faccion armada del Partido Comunista Venezolano,
proscritodebido a su apoyo a Ia guerra de guerrillas. Fue tan notoria Ia aspiracion
experimental del grupo, Ia identificacion entre acciony pensamiento de vanguardia
que lo distingufa de Ia izqu ierda militante de Ia decada de 1960, que el escritor
Caopolican Ovalles fue buscado por Ia policfa por Ia publicacion del poema
incendiario tDuerme Us ted, Senor Presidente? viendose forzado ahuir a Colombia
y pasar a Ia clandestinidad mientras Adriano Gonzalez Leon, era detenido por
prologar ellibro. En efecto, Ia adhesion militante de El Techo de Ia Ballena a Ia
lucha armada se antici po a experiencias de arte y polftica como Tucuman Arde
(Rosario, Argentina, 1968P La izquierda reunida en Tabla Redonda, en cambia,
como bien lo demuestra el estudio aportado par Angel Rama,2> estaba ceiiida
conservadoramente a los mode los realistas del arte y Ia literatura de propaganda.
Poco antes de Ia disolucion de El Techo de IaBallena en 1968, Jacobo Borges, quien
tambien formo parte de Ia orbita de plasticos ligados a este grupo, fue invitado a
colaborar en un proyecto en homenaje al cuarto centenario de Caracas, el cual serfa
fina nciado par el Consejo Municipal de Ia ciudad y producido par el filantropo e
histori ador lnocente Pala cios. Luego de casi tres aiios de trabaj o intensivo y
despues del terremoto que sacudi6 a Caracas en 1967. Borges y un grupo de
colaboradores de diversas disciplinas presentaronlmagen de Caracas. evento que
Lourdes Blanco caracteriz6 de "proyecto cinematografico-ambiental fallido", cuyo
"rccuerdo fulgurante" permaneci6 en quienes pudieron verlo 1 Este proyecto
recog i6 buena parte de las discusiones sabre el realisrno que se desarrollaron en
distintos ambitos de Ia vida intelcctual venezolana durante Ia decada de 1960.
Tratandose de un proyecto publ ico comisionado a Borges, pintor figurativo y
escenografo qui en contaba con el apoyo de los crfticos mas importantes del pals,
Imagen de Caracas nose limit6 a ofrecer un portentoso experimento visual en el
cual participaron artista s y tecnicos de cliversas disciplinas, sino que llev61a idea
de autorfa a terminos impensables. a[m por su(s) propio(s) autor(es). al desplazar
Ia co laboracion colcctiva h cia el espacio p[1blico. re clar las relaciones do
producci6n entre Ia abra y su tiempo a traves de un complejo dispositivo tecnico
y al plantear una equivalencia entre el publico y el artista .·" De acuerdo a sus
"autores"29 lmagen de Caracas no era un espectaculo situado en los confines del
cine o del teatro, pues planteaba una revision critica de las convenciones de estas
disciplinas en su relaci6n con el publico
La escena italiana, con sus fosos, proscenio, su piso inclinado, sus falsas
perspectives, SU punta de vision unico. SU espacio para el publico, SUS
galerfas. sus palcos, es una concepcion ya muerta. Toda las subvenciones
del mundo no pueden detener su ru ina. El publico sensible a los grandes
i6
espectaculos, como son las gran des tiendas, aeropuertos, fabricas, mftines
gigantes y el cine. No comprende ni le interesan ese dramas individuales 0
el teatro de vedette I... ] Nosotros querfamos un espectaculo crftico!rente a
nuestro tiempo. Frente a Ia relacion hombre-ciudad-objeto Por eso noera en
Ia escena que fbamos a buscar Ia respuesta. Era en Ia calle, en las feriasJo
En un enclave del centro de Ia ciudad, Borges y Juan Pedro PosaniJ1proyectaron
una compleja arquitectura a Ia cual el publico accedfa por una entrada lateral yen
cuyo interior se levantaba una estructura de formas geometricas configurada a
manera de ciudadela recorrible con andamios sostenidos por tubas, columnas
rampas, reflectores. ocho pantallas gigantes modulares y cubos suspendidos dei
tech aaalturas yniveles variables. En este espacio sucedfan proyecciones unicas
simultaneas y multiples de filmes cuya ace ion era narrada de man era no lineal, co~
una banda sonora especial mente compuesta para el evento. Esta suertede quasi
cinemaJLdisponfa de un complejo esquema de funcionamiento emplazados en un
eje establecido por cuatro columnas ubicadas en el centro de Ia plantil del edificio
se colocaron ocho proyectores de 35 mm dispuestos en pares y cuarenta y cinco
proyectores de diapositivasdesplazados a lo largo yancho del espacio El publico
solo podiaobtener una vision de conjunto del evento atravesde dos plataformas de
desplazamiento. El complejo dispositivo tecnologico que acompaiiaba I<r.structura
]
era control ado por un computador, programado para el evento par un fisico ,3
Las imagenes filmadas en blanco y negro y color fueron realizadas par clife1entes
unidades a cargo del cineasta Mario Robles y delmismo Borges, eltexto fue
elaborado par Adriano Gonzalez Leon y narrado por Salvador Garmendia (ambos
escritores destacados y miembros de El Techo de Ia Ballena). y I· mD~ ica fue
compuesta par el chilena Jose Vicente Asuar. quien venia de formarse en Alemania,
y mas adelante, lunda un laboratorio de musica electroacustica BorQt.Sy sus
colaboradores dividieron Ia accion en un relata fraccionado en dos perfodos: Ia ]
historia desde Ia conquista hasta 1800 y Ia vida colonial pre-republicana hasta
1967 Los episodios fueron real izados mezclando actores con perscnas sin
experiencia previa" en espacios naturales ycon una marcada influenciaestilfstica ]
del neorrealismo y del cinema novo brasileiio. El montaje fin al combinaba
imagenes originalescon fragmentos dedocumentales etnograticos, dcterrninando
uso del blanco y negro y el color de acuerdo a los contenidos dramatir.os decada
episoclio :~: El arg umento historico parlia de una interpretaci on c.rft;r:: rle los
]
procesos de Ia conquista y Ia colnni7aci6n clonde los c onflicto ~ ric ' l c -.~ y las
divisiones ideologiras entre los protagonistas Griln acentuados. I ,.. , 1te las
proyecciones ocurrfan inter P.nciones de algunos de los actores y f;" · ·' 1l8S de J
las pelfcu las en el e$pacio que hacfan coincidir Ia acci6n filmada con IJ ~ •. '! Esto
es, un muchJcho se desplazaba a toda volocidad en una motoCICieta ta;; . 1 en Ia
pantalla como en el espacio donde el publico miraba Ia escena. J
AI mes de su presentaci6n. Imagen de Caracas fue clausurada del'' h a su
interpretacion polemica de Ia histor;a nacional. No obstante. los prod :;c U'~S del J
proyecto, ediles del Consejo Municipal de Cdracas. pretextaron cl aLII ,;:.•. l Je los
costas para declar~ r su cicrre ·r Sir.ndo el venezolano un sistema de f::>ntropfa
estatal. las fricciones entre el estado y los artistas se repetirfan a Ia i r~o de las
decadas en el campo cultural, especial mente en los ambitos e.< perimcnt?les del
arte no-objetual En 1969, Rafael Caldera. licler conservador fundador dnl p rtido
dem6crata cristiano,-- 1 era electo presidente y al poco tiempo cle su I I8U~cla al
pod er implemento una ley de amni stfa para los insurgentes que 1ceptaran
separarse de Ia guerra de guerrillas. Ese mismo ailo Antonieta Sosa d~struirfa
Plataforma II, obra tridimensional de Ia artista incluida en una exposici6n individual
que realiz6 en el Ateneo de Caracas:Jacomo protesta porIa participaci6n oficial de
Venezuela en Ia Bienal de Sao Paulo. sa AI convocar al evento Sosa no dej6 de
responder sarcasticamenle ante Ia pole111ica intervene ion de un crfticu •'lJienla
conminaba a no destruir un bien cu ltural que podrfa pasar a formar p·'rte del
 . · de cualquier museo de provincia "LSabe usted Ia que es un happening?
0
patnmonlro Ia presiento" 41 La artista habra regresado al pa ls despues de conclu ir
Yo 0 ~: peen Californiayentonces desarrollaba una serie de piezas tridimensionales
estu ~teas en Jas cuales se iba articulando aquello que Peggy Phelan ha
georn .r~do parafraseando a Merleau Panty, "los contornos fenomenolog icos del
denoml~smo:. obras transformables en objetos activados mediante Ia participacion
ta~to ~:ico atravesde acciones flsicas. 42 En este caso. Ia plataforma destruida par
de pufuncionaba para saltar en ella, poniendo en evidencia Ia tension existente
Sosa Ia funcion del objeto y el peligro de manipularlo presente en muchas de sus
ebntre tempranas hasta Situaci6n 1/amada cas a (1981. Museo de Bellas Artes).
o ras el dla Ia inauguracJOn
donde · 1as especta_dores po d'_1 an arroJar
· hasta 20 capas_ de
'd· con Ia artista hac1a una construCCJon de ladnllos desp111tados que alud1a a
~;sr~viendas marginales (ran~hos) 43 Si bien romper un obj~to puede resultar
Jiberador y catartico, Ia acc10n ~one en Juego Ia anatom1a destruct1va del
ectador en una posi ble relac1on amb1valente con Ia art1sta. Este substrata
~~~osivo de Ia obra de Sosa. trae a colacion las aprehensiones expresadas par
Lygia Clark cuanrlo hablaba de ser desflorada par el espectador.44
El apremio politico de Sosa al convocar al evento de protesta par Ia biena l es
comparable a Ia destruccion de obras llevada a cabo par los artistas de Ia
vanguardiaporteha meses antes en ellnst1tuto D1 Tel Ia de Buenos A1res. 4' y fue
en el momenta definido par Sosa como un happening destinado a producir "una
positiva toma de ·onciencia de los problemas socio-culturales y al enriquecimiento
de nuestra expcriencia artlstica." 1' Volcada hacia Ia investigacion sabre las
relaciones estruLturales entre las casas, sus funciones y Ia interaccion con el
publico, Ia busqu.oda de Sosa permuto hacia una introspeccion hacia su propio
cuerpo y esta mudo a Ia danza contemporanea, discipl ina a Ia cua l la artista se
entreg6 durante casi seis anos para luego regresar a las artes visuales ydedicarse
adiversas facetas de Ia pedagog Ia. En 1980, en Conversaci6n con Baiio de Agua
1ibia pres entad a en Ia GAN, Sosa permanecla sentada mientras era lentamente
vendada con papel higienico par Helena Vi llalobos hasta quedar total mente cubie11a.
La acci6n iba acompanada de unaconversacion previa mentegrabada entre el artista
Hector Fuenmayor y el compositor Alfredo del Monaco sabre las operaciones
propuestaspar Iaobra de arte como una forma discursiva o una manera de pensar.
AI final. VillaJ(lhos baiiaba a Sosa con una cubeta !lena de agua. deshaciendo Ia
forma escult61 ., modelada par Ia castro de papel adherida al cuerpo cle Ia artista.
Eljoven peri or' ·•a, actor yartista de performanceMarco Antonio Ettedyui advirtio
el potencial p .: jpativo y emancipatorio del arte nn-objetual para el pC1blico de
un pals subde..,_ ,oil ado aiiJuscar lugares cle insercion donde Ia separacion entre
el arte yIa vici;1 desapareciera "Mi arte es el arte de los rincones, no de sa lanes.
de rincones. La moyorla fueron hechos en garajes. casas particulares y balcones
a/ aire libre. El espectador cambia cuando es tra ado en estos lugares" :i En este
contexto llarr, ::1atencion que al despuntar Ia decada de 1980 el repentino in teres
del publico y r/ dpoyo institucional al performance y las acciones corrieron
paralelos al r: :o ,·vo impulso que el directory promotor argentino Carl os Gimenez
diera al ter1trn o:1 Venezuela A partir de Ia fundacion del grupo Rajatabla y del
Festiva/lnte/;1 ~<,una I de Teatro de Ca1acas (1975). :· am bas iniciativas de Gimenez,
se mostraron !as obras de los dramaturgos y grupos experimentales mas
influyentes dt :a posguerra tales como Gutai, Tadeuz Kantor, Augusto Baal, Peter
Weiss, Livi ng Thea tre. Els Joglars y Lindsay Kemp Gimenez no solo creo un
entramado inotitucional que favorecio Ia presencia de grupos experimentales de
America Lati1J, Europa, Asia y los Estados Unidos, sino que permitio Ia insercion
de las practicds no-objetuales dentro del festival, no en balde encargadas a Ia
coordinacion de Marco Antonio Ettedgui
Si bien el cruceentre teatro y arte no-objetual excede Ia extension y los objetivos
de este texto, Lo importante seiialar el papcl central que tuvo Carlos Gimenezen
Ia articulacion publica de los lenguajes experimentales y trans-disciplinarios que
favorecieron Ia legitimacion institucional del performance y las acciones. No es
casual que esta suerte de edad de oro del arte no-objetual tambien coi ncida con
el regreso al pals de Pedro Teran, Diego Barboza, Rolando Pena, Carlos Zerpa, Yeni
y Nan y Ia apa ricion de artistas emergentes como Marco Antonio Ettedgui, Alfred
Wenemoser y Juan Loyola
A diferencia de Ia generacion de Alejandro Otero, Jesus Soto y Carlos Cruz-Diez
quienes se establecieron en el Paris de Ia posguerra. los artistas emergentes ahara
viajaban a Nueva Yorky a Land res atraldos por un nuevo tipo de arte que tomaba
forma en performances, acciones, textos y documentacion fotografica que
privilegiaba el contexto, rechazaba el objeto en aras de su desmaterializacion yde
acuerdo a Alexander Alberro, situaba al arte en "el umbra! de Ia informacion" 49
En este contexto, en 1970, el Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York habra
organizado Informacion (Information). exposicion que catapu lto las practicas
conceptuales globales incluyendo obras de artistas latinoamericanos como Helio
Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Artur Barrio, The New York Graphic Workshop, David
Lamelas, Alejandro Puente, entre otros. Otro tanto habra sucedido en Berna y luego
en Londres con Ia muestra Cuando Ia Actitud deviene Forma (When Attitudes
Become Form), version europea del conceptualismo
Venezuela fue uno de los pocos parses latinoamericanos no alcanzado par
epidemia de dictaduras r11ilitares esparcidas par Centro y Sudamerica durante los
afios del Plan Condor y bajo Ia influencia de Ia Escuela de las Americasso No
obstante, el pals permanecla aferrado a Ia proyeccion del arte abstracto y del
cinetismo, para Ia fecha ya oficializados y convertidos en escuelas. Los cam bios
dictados par elzeitgeistde Ia contracultura hippie, Ia revolucion sexua l, el repudio
generalizado hacia Ia invasion norteamericana a Vietnam y Ia urgencia polltica
despertada par Ia revolucion cubana que acompafiaron las luchas estudianti les
internacionales del fin al de Ia decada de 1960, estuvieron, en una medida mas
modesta, vinculados localmente a Ia guerra de guerrillas y al movimiento de
reforma academica gestado en Ia Universidad Central de Venezue la y conocido
como "La renovacion ".
Despues de Ia pacificacion de Ia guerrilla ydurante el primer perlodo presidencial
cle Carlos Andres Perez(197 4- 1979) lagro consol iclarse cl modelo constitucional
bipartidista Los artistas emergentes colonizaron espacios alternativos en busca
de Ia ampliacion cle Ia idea de arte precon izacla enmuestras como Informacion
Cuando Ia Actitud del'iene Forma. Este momenta roincide con el incremento
exponencial de Ia renta petrol era al ser nacionalizada Ia industria. generando una
enorme rique za administrada par un gobierno que no aseguro Ia distribucion
equitativa de los ingresos hacia los sectores mas pobres de Ia poblacion. Dicho
perlodo, caracterizado ironicamente par los historiadores como "Ia gran
Venezuela", vino acompaiiado de inversiones millonarias en infraestructura y
educacion superior que encleudaron al estado y genera ron una enorme corrupcion
en el sector publico y una cu ltura de consun1o. Ya Liescle el inicio de Ia decada
cle 1970. los artistas erncrgenies se hablan aglutinaclo en torno al salon de arte
crca o por Lourdes Blanco en Ia Sala de Ia Fundacion Mendozacon el provocador
titulo Once Tipos.~: y comenzaban a mostrar en sua bra el germen de un malestar
generacional causa do par los procesos de modernizacion acelerados implernentados
en el pais, los cuales fueron acompaiiados de momentos de represi on polltica y
advertian del peligro de Ia exclusion sociaJ:JDicho grupo estuvo conformado en
su mayorla par jovenes pertenecientes a Ia clase media profesiona l urbana. aun
incipienteaunque en plena crecirniento debido al bienestar economico asegurado
par los petrodolares.
En 1971, Sigfreda Chacon, Ibrahim Nebreda y Will iam Stone presentaron El
Autobtis, experiencia participativa donde el publ ico podia entrur a un vehiculo
 colectivo estacionado en el Ateneo de Caracas. Refiriendose a este, Lourdes
Blanco recalca Ia intencion reactiva de este grupo heterogeneo de artistas,
liderados en un primer momenta par Stone, quienes junto a otros del lnstituto de
Diseiio Neumann, El CEGRA y Ia Escuela de Artes Plasticas "concibieron Ia idea
de crear un movimiento que se apartara tanto de Ia nueva figuracion como del
cinetismo, pues en el Iondo elias tambien estaban bajo los efluvios de un querer
hacer en una dimension que clamaba par Ia participacion del publico, pero tambien
su sacud i miento".~4
A elias se adhieren artistas de una generacion intermedia Claudio Perna, profesor
de geograffa en Ia Universidad Central de Venezuela, Diego Barboza, poeta ypintor
forma do en Maracaibo y Rolando Pefia, precursor del happening, Ia danza yel cine
experimental, quienes habian recorrido Europa y los Estados Unidos en busca de
otros horizontes Barboza y Perna habfan real izado arte correo, Iibras de artista y
experi mentado con formas effmeras de Ia visualidad hoy rubricadas dentro de las
practicas conceptuales Perna y Barboza, quienes tambien formaron parte de los
programas de Ia Libreria Cruz del Sur, espacio alternative abierto a modalidades
artfsticas no convencionales; exploraron el potencial participative de Ia cu ltura
popular para elaborar obras volcadas hacia lo vernaculo o lo popular-festivo
generando situaciones donde eventual mente se producfan comunidades o
interacciones ludicas. En el caso de Perna, dicho potencial fue empleado a manera
de metacritica corrosiva ante un sistema que tendia a Ia marginacion oal destierro
de lo popular en Ia cultura para segregarlo de los procesos de modernizacion.
Perna presento en dos ediciones distintas del salon Once Tipos al conjunto de
salsa Chicles de Antonio Mendoza como "escultura sonora" y mas adelante Lluvia,
escultura social, instalacion consistente en una prostituta sentada junto a una
mesa y una rockola (juke box) ., Pocos afios atras, habra desarrollado colaboraciones
con Charlotte Moorman, Antonio Miralda y Antoni Muntadas, quienes habian
viajado al pais invitados a los festivales internacionales de video realizados en el
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo par Margarita D'Amico. Su insaciable curiosidad
par explorar procedimientos desmaterializados de las artes visuales abarco desde
pinturas encargadas a rotul istas de cine hasta fotocopias y fotografias de desecho
recogidas y reunidas par el artista en una exposici6n que intentaba reconfigurar
el imaginario nacional desde sus franjas residuales. Perna colaboro con Eugenio
Espinoza,'" Hector Fuenmayor, Alfred Wenemoser y Roberto Obregon, artistas
quicnes compartian con ella necesidad de ampliar Ia noci6n de arte en un pais
donde las modalidades abstractas del arte moderno fueron, y atlll son
consideradas, instrumento de modernizacion.
El derroche iniciado durante el gobicrno de Carlos Andres Perez se prolongo en el
perlodo constitucional de Luis Herrera Campins (1979- 198~) hasta que estaii61Cl
crisis economica conocida como el "Viernes Negro". cuando Herrera Campins se
via forzado adevaluar Ia moneda nacional ante Ia caida vertiginosa de losprecios
del petroleo en 1983 Frente al conformismo politico del periodo que precedio al
"Viernes Negro" con grandes ingresos petroleras y caracterizado par el aumento
de las importacioncs. el consumoexcesivo, Ia evasion fiscal y Ia corrupcitinptiblica
y privada. Diego Barboza y Pedro Teran. artistas procedentes del debate idcol6gico
de Ia nueva figUJaciun desarrollado en Ia decada de 1960 en el espaciJ indepen, isnt
de El Circulo del Pez Dorado, emprendieron una revision antropologica de Ia cultura
popular, el folklore y de los mitos fundadores de Ia republica. A elias se sumarian
desde posturas divergentes y heterodoxas Rolando Pefia, quien habia explorado
los rituales de Ia santeria, Carlos Zerpa, y despues Juan Loyola
A manera de intervencion en las fiestas populares venezolanas, Diego Barboza
realiz6 el evento Ia Caja del cachicamo, donde una multitud se cubria con una
extensa lana raja preparada par el artista para simular Ia caparazon del animal,
procluc ienclo lo que Elsa Flores uetect6 acertaclamente "una feliz alianza de
elementos conceptuales y alusiones folkl6rica s" '~ Concebido par Barboza p ra
258
ser llevado a cabo en espacios abiertos y "de conmemoraci6n ciudadana" 59
una ciudad d?nde estas form as de interacci6n .comunitana fueron expulsadas~~
los lugares publ1 cos par el humo de los automoviles y Ia 1nvas16n de Ia economra
1nformal, d~ n vados a su v.ezde un crec1m1ento demogr?f1co no controladoydel
caos. u;,bamstJco caractenst1cos de las cap1tales penfencas 6o Este "poema de
aCCJon como Iuera defJnJdo. par el prop1o Barboza, revalorizaba Ia celebracion
colect1va de una act1v1dad lud1camente produc1da par miembros de un cuerp
0
social an6nimo, poniendo una manifestacion artistica al alcance de un public
mas ampl io que el de los museosG' Otros "poemas de acci6n" concebidos poo
Barboza en Londres inclulan muchachas cubiertas con mayas o redes de colore;
quienes se desplazaban par Ia via publica, en manifestaciones o conciertos de
musica pop, interviniendo el espacio publico ysus "pro-testas" donde muchachas
portaban sombreros de co lares
Carlos Zerpa, en cambia, venia explorando lo popular desde una linea formulada
par Ia carnavalesco que invertia l~s reg las del juego al mostrar ellado grotesco y
oscuro de Ia cultura popular, los s1mbolos patnos y los ntuales magico-religiosos I
Formado en el lnstituto Politecnico de Diseno de Milan. al final de Ia decada de
1970 Zerpa comenzo a colabora r con el co lectivo mexicano No Grupo, a cuyos
miembros conoc io a partir del Primer Coloquio Latinoamericano de Arte No-
Objetual de Medellin. El No Grupo "planteaba una rama disidente del proyecto
politico de los grupos una guerrilla par6dica que sacaba provecho tanto de Ia
solemnidad de los artistas comprometidos, como de Ia torpeza de las in~tituciones
culturales y los mitos sociales sabre el artista (.. )" '' Mas adelante con elias
continuo desarrollando performances importantes como Caliente-Caliente
presentado en el Museo de Arte Moderno cle Mexico (1982) ' Junto a Perna'
Barboza y Yeni y Nan, Zerpa tambien participa en Ia muestra 20 artista~
I
venezolanos de hoy (1979), organizada par Margarita D'Amico en el Centro de
Arte y Comunicacion (CAYC) de Buenos Aires, a Ia sazon un espacio dedicado a
mostrar modalidades conceptuales bajo Ia direcci6n de Jorge Glusberg En el
1
teatro La Campana de Valencia, Venezuela habia presentado el performance Cada
cual con su propio santo, obra censurada par su critica poco complaciente a Ia
religion institucionalizada. Luego se uni6 a Marco Antonio Ettedgui y Pedro Teran
en programas dedicados a experiencias no-objetuales realizados en diversos
lugares de Caracas y del interior del pais A este periodo tertii corresponde
Ceremonia con Armas Blancas (1981), performance p1esentado en fil Sala de Ia
Gobernacion del Distrito Federal ~entro del ciclo Accione3 frente ah i''ri'a yluego
en Mexico Escogiendouno carta de amor como BJC parasostene ·la :·.: ~ : ,, Zerpa
encarnaba el papel de prec;idiario y lela con In nra pintacla de 1'1 ::" ~ como un
mimo mi entras se escuchaba un bolero interpretado par Julio Jar a n n , r~ ymusica
compuesta para Ia pieza. La accion transcurria con una atmosfcro dr ntimidad
creada par el tono confesional de Zerpa, el cual, segun testigos. era viul cl tado por l
estados de agitaci6n yviolencia donde el artista lograba involucrar al tiblico con
interrupciones de manera brechtiana y sin proponer una catarsis finol :
~ ormaci,J en artes plastica.; y en ciJH:~ en Lonclrcs doncl8 realiw JC L; un ~:, en las
rall~s y obtuvo un premia importante en Ikon Gallery, a su regreso Pe ro Teran
trilb3JO con su cuerpo y desde el cuerpo encarno multiples ver iones tlel .nitade
El Dorado-Manoa con un lenguaje visual extremadamente estilizado yper anal. AI
igual que Rolando Pena, muchos de sus performances (Cuerpo de exposici6n, 1973)
se construian desde una mirada narcisista para. atraves de esta forma deafirmacion
del poder masculino, reintroducir al publico en Ia historia y sus ficciones 65
Valiendose de gestos de una masculinidad extrema, Teran desdoblaua su cuerpo
para feminizarloy mostrar su subjetividad En este sentido, Teran hace un deslinde
te6rico entre performances, eventos que para el establecen una conexi6n intima
entre el espectador. el cuerpo yIa subjetividad al ritualizar el tiempo, 'enun Iugar
opuesto, las acciones. encaminadas llacia lo publico doncle lo que owr ,e nose
inscribe clentro de un ritua if'' Nubes para Colombi:J (1980- 1981), pcr1ormance
 'd do para una exposici6n nunca realizada en BogotaB 7 ypresentado nueva mente
1eal Museo de Bellas Artes en el programa de Acciones frente a Ia plaza y luego
eneel Mus eo de Arte Contemporaneo Francisco Narvaez en Margarita, se
~n arro116 como un ritual shamanico realizado en tres secuencias, las cuales se
. es·aban con el artista manipulando telas y pigmentos con co lares de las banderas
~1 .
de Colombia y de Venezuela para luego pasar a desgarrar sus ropas y culmmar
briendo su cuerpo desnudo de dorado y transformarse en una suerte de
~~presentaci6n escult6rica del mito de ElDorado 68
Caso aparte merece Rolando Pena dentro de esta narrativa, pionero del happening
el pertormance quien en sus idas y venidas de Nueva York y Europa frecuent6 el
~frculo de Andy Warhol, participando en las actividades de I~ primer.a Factory que
·ncluyeron experienc1as en c1ne y teatro expenmental. Pena curso estud1os de
~anza contemporanea en Ia campania de Martha Graham, en una linea equivalente
aIa adoptadapor Antoni eta Sosa o Ia artista feminista Nela Ochoa. Realiz6 obras
tempranas que present6 en Ia Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo de Ia
Universidad Central de Venezuela, situadas a caballo entre el teatro y el
performance Entre .estas destaca Hornenaje a Miller, realizada en colaboraci6n
con el escritor Jose lgnac1o CabruJaS y el arqllltecto Dommgo Alvarez. 59 En Ia
decada de 1970, Pena habia participado en los festivales y exposiciones
organizados por Margarita D'Amico. Anos mas tarde, present6 un performance en
el VFestivallntemacwnal de Teatro de espec1al potenc1a s1mbol1ca e 1mpacto.
Petr61eo Crucio, donde a traves de una serie de acciones fisicas en las cuale
violentaba su cuerpo ydestruia objetos, culminaba baiiandose en petrol eo liquido
quevertfa deunbarril. Tambien conocido como el Principe Negro, Peiia se apropi6
en adelant ue Ia principal fuente de producci6n energetica del mundo para
transformarlc en metafora de Ia naci6n condenada par su propia riqueza
Si Rolando Pena transform ael petrol eo en contrarrelato de Ia modernizaci6n, Juan
Loyola manip•JI6 Ia bandera nacional para reinscribirla en lugares ajenos al
discurso hegem6nico de Ia patria, ya insostenible a mediados de Ia decada de
1980, cuandoJaime Lusinchi (1984-89) asumi61a presidencia despues de Ia crisis
econ6mica el "Viernes Negro" Lusinchi, un medico soc ial dem6crata de
extracci6n ht•~n ilde qui en lleg6 al poder conla promesa de restituir Ia estabilidad
polftica horaJ~ da par Ia cleptocracia y Ia escalada de los indices de pobreza. no
mantuvo el .l'mpromiso de sanear Ia administraci6n pC1blica y crear nuevas
empleos y &u ent6 los niveles de represi6n. En este periodo de desencanto
despolitizaci: 1 JuanLoyola organiz6 performances enespacios liminares, donde
pintaba Ia be,, ·'·'ra en carcazasde automriviles abandonados. piedras ornamentales
de las auto: ras y chatarra industrial esparcida por Ia ciudad Este acto se
convirti6 en L , ritual politico que, par otra parte, asaltaba Ia vida cotidiana de los
habitantes deCaracas al mostrar estos desechos marcados con un simbolo vaciado
par Iadisful' onalidad de su discurso Par otra parte. Ia reinserci6n de Ia bandera
en elementL del desecho y del paisajismo urbana fue el resu ltado del usa
sistematico t:t~ Ia simbologia nacionalista en eve ntos y acciones realizadas par
Loyola desdt. 111 decacla del1900 clonde estos eran dcstruido~ . Loyola fue arresiado
en innumera' > ~::a s iones par Ia rolicfa mientras realizaba estasacciones de call e.
Lacolaborac in sostenida en el tiempo entre artistas es un rasgo ajeno a Ia cultura
del venezol . 10, en cuyo contexto irrumpieron Yeni (Jennifer Hackshaw) y Nan
(Marfa Lu is·Jr:onzalez) al proponer durante siete anos obras realizadas a duo
situadas entlf.' Ia danzac perimental, el teatro yel performance En contraste con
sus compancros de generaci6n, Yeni y Nan no apelaron a Ia patria. a Ia cultura
popular oa I s mitos sino a un lenguaJe feminista auto-rcflexivo yen dialogo con
Ia naturalez y con experiencias de danza contemporanea aportadas par Simone
F~rti 0 Yvon I nainer. El agua. los fluirlos, los cristales ylos r.lr.mentos fueron Ins
BJes poetico' dcsplegados par estas artistas que exploraron "Ia identidad personal.
los Ifmites ~tl espacio individual y compartido en Ia dialectica del t ·-yo" '·Como
bien lo seiiala Amelia Jones, el cuerpo ha sido, ellugar donde las identidades, en
plural, son auto concebidas e interpretadas De acuerdo con este principia, Jones
estima que par ella las practicas artisticas corporales se han volcado a Ia
exploraci6n de las subjetividades multiples, dispersas y no normativasn Yeni y
Nan mostraron el caracter contingente e inestable de las identidades en muchos
de sus performances desde Nacimiento (1979, Galeria Angel Boscan, Caracas)
lntegraciones en agua (1981I trabajo presentado en Ia Bienal de Sao Paulo y
propuesto para Ia Bienal de Paris, donde el encuentro de sus cuerpos y Ia
gestua lidad acompasada de sus movimientos eran el centro de acciones construidas
para poner en cuesti6n las distinciones binarias interior-exterior. publico-privado,
dentro-afuera y que, de acuerdo a Juan Ca lzadilla, en el caso de Acci6n divisoria
del espacio (1981) "rompen el esquema axial de Ia pareja" n
Si Ia informacion fue una preocupaci6n compartida par los conceptualistas del
mundo, relativizando con ella Ia oposicion centro-periferia, Ia comunicacion fue un
puente ideatico entre artistas como Alfred Wenemoser, Claudio Perna y Marco
Antonio Ettedgui Tal vez atraido par el cosmopolitismo del cual disfrutaba
Venezuela, Alfred Wenemoser radica en el pais desde 1980, donde ha realizado
varios performances en los cuales se cuestiona el posicionamiento de Ia obra de
arte en sf dentro de un sistema de distribucion y consumo de informacion Las
acciones de Wenemoser como las de Ettedgui y las de Perna, han mostrado las
convenciones del arte (Persona a Persona, Domo Plaza Bolivar, 1981) y Ia manera
como estas se transmiten al publico, caracterizandose par una economfa de
recursos donde se invierte Ia relacion pasiva o vouyerista del espectador y
llevandolas asituaciones dilematicas. Nacido en Graz y marcado par Ia influencia
del accionismo vienes. Wenemoser paso de inmediato aformar parte del grupo de
artistas de performance caraquenos. Ida Pfngala II, acci6n escogida para Ia Bienal
de Sao Paulo de 1981 y presentada con variantes en el VFestival de Teatro, partia
de Ia simbologfa de Ia filosoffa tantrica para elaborar una situaci6n donde el artista
y el espectador se encontraban en una disyuntiva o una ambigUedad etica a
Wenemoser, acostado en el centro de Ia escena despues de guardar ayuno por 3
dias, esperaba el veredicto del publico, cubierto par mascaras, quien debia elegir
entre el sol (Pfngala). entidad masculina, emblematizado par naranjas colocadas
en ellugar de Ia representaci6n o Ia luna (Ida). entidad femenina, representada par
una paloma blanca cautiva bajo un casco. Si el ptiblico elegia comer naranjas esto
significaba queel artista no comeriil y si sr. elegia Ia paloma. el artista terminaria
~u ayu1vJ comiendola.
En una direcrinn que apuntaiJa a Ia comunicaci6n con el pC11Jiico. Marco Antonio
Ettcdgui. cuya tragica muerte a los 22 a11os trunc6una ca rrera brillante. realiz6 un
importantee ·en to autobiogratico que sacudi6 el tejido institucional de losmuseos
nacionales Presentaclo en el marco de lndagaci6n de lo Imagen, exposici6n
propuesta por el propio Ettedgui para Ia GAN, FelizCurnplear1os fue uneven to en
el cual el artista convoc6 al publico general, familiares y amistades a celebrar su
an iversa ri o en una fiesta realizada en los espacios del museo. Si ellema "lo
personal espolitico" empl eado par 3cti1 istas femi nistas en Ia decada de 1970 fuc
una legitima expresi6n de IJ necesiclad de reconocimiento alas libertades privadas
y Ia diferencia sexual como parte de los rcivindicac iones y derechos de las
mujeres. Ettedgui rccuper6 te6ricamente Ia dimension libertaria de este principia
al aplicarlo a Ia esfera privada y al espacio simb61ico de Ia identidad nacional (en
elmuseo dedicado al arte venezolano) AI realizar su fiesta, un acto privado, como
una situaci6n de Ia vida cotidiana compartida con el publico yamigos y familiares,
Ettedgui no s61o barraba los limites entre arte y vida sino que barraba de hecho
las distinciones entre lo publico y lo privado
Lils experienciils y situilciones seiialiidas il In lnrgo rle este texto no totalizan Ia
historia del arte no-objetualni Ia reducen a una lista de experi encias ineditas
3portada por determinados artistas 1 ·i En elias se articulo una vision alternativa de
 Venezuela a Ia que se construy6 desde el arte abstracto y el cinetismo para
sostener que solo el pais podia alcanzar el progreso y Ia independencia cultural
adaptando estas formas universales de Ia madernidad visual. Dichas formas,
auta-contenidas y aut6nomas, resultaron atractivas para el proyecto de
modernizaci6n de las elites intelectuales, econ6micas y politicas en tanto que
ostentaban Iapromesa de establecimiento de un arden racianal en unpais minado
par el militarismo yel subdesarrollo. Par cantraste, el modelo dist6pico propuesto
par las practicas no-objetuales y las modalidades canceptuales locales no solo
cuestionaba ese arden voluntarista que suprimia el mestizaje cu ltural de Ia
narrativamoderna, sino que praponian repensarlo contextual mente en funcion de
lo popular y de lo vernaculo, como fuerzas organicamente ligadas a Ia canstituci6n
del pais. Otro rasgo geneal6gica de estas experiencias indica que elias cuestionaron
Ia centralidad y el individualisma del artista como genio creadar en aras de una
pedagogia colectiva, poniendo en jaque al Iugar de exhibici6n como ambito
profesional s61o limitado a Ia contemplaci6n estetica. Estas practicas hibridas,
trans-disciplinarias y participativas, fueron pensadas para ocupar rincanes, Iuera
y dentro del museo, como lo sugirio Marco Antonio Ettedgui y para hacerse
presentes en aquellos lugares incomodos que el teorico Homi Bhabha ha
denominado figuras liminales del espacio-nacion, intersticios de Ia modernidad
donde ninguna idealogfa politica o proyecto etnogratico pueden ejercer su
autoridad trascendente o metaffsica.75De alii Ia resistencia de las instituciones a
preservar su memoria y de Ia crftica, a interpretarla
AUn aceptando que los happenings, performances, acciones y situaciones no carecen de
objeto aunque Ia desmaterialicen, hemos optado par utilizar el termino "arte no-objetual".
empleado par el critico perunno radicado en Mexico, Juan Acha, debido a que este nos
permite abarcar manifestaciones no necesariamente teatrales donde el cuerpo del artista
no requiere intervenir para crear una situaci6n o propiciar un acontecimiento. Par otra
parte, el termi no "no-objetual" recupera hist6ricamente el referente del Primer Coloquio
Latinoamericano de Arte No-Objetual rea lizado en Medellin, Colombia en 1981, even to que
marco posturas divergentes a las de aquellos criticos que JUi garon los happenings,
performances y acciones como derivaciones de desarrollos ocurridos en los EEUU y Europa
Acha fue un gran promotor regional de este tipo de arte hibrido y efimero estimulando a
artistas que se abrian paso en medias muy conservadores.
2 Amelia Jones, Body Art, Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis y Londres, 1998). 21
Ariel JimGneL, "Tradici6n y Rupturv," L: imenciun drJ Ia wntinuidad (Ga lu ia de Artc
Naciondl CaracJ ·, 19971, 37.
tvlaria Elcnil Ramus, "Unndproximacion al cuerJ10dr>l perfnrrnance en \'enu uela," Revisra
Pulgar (Ci!racrrs, 7007)
Juan Ciil,iJdillu. "Sittc c:unto, p,:ra una nue•J :dqica del <H!L \ e ll'- Jlartu. ". i~. .~;u:IL .;
frtJn!e a ld p/iw (Fumlarte: Caraca). 1995). sp.
La vida institucional mas reciente tuvo Iugar en Ia clecada de 1990, a traves de diversos
eventos de artescorporales'/ exllibicionesauspiciados par el Museo de Bellas Artes bJjo
Ia direcci6n de ;Jaria Elena Ramos. En aquella decacla Ia Galeria de Arte Nacional y el
Museo AleJandro Otero tamhirn ahrieron ocasionalmentP su' programacionr.s para lil
presentacr6n de performances y acciones en muestras tematicas
Tras descartar Ia ideo de realizar una exposici6n conmemorati vc~, lnocente Palorros y
Mrguel Arro1 o convencieron a los miembros del Consejo Municipal de Caracas dar cdrta
blanca aJacobo Borges ilasta aprobar el proyecto "multimedia" en 1967, el cual cclebraria
el 400 aniversario de Ia fumlaci6n de Ia ciuclad. Palacios queclaria como productor del
mismo ejerciendo una funri6n mediadora entre el estado y el ilrtistil y sus colahoradore'
8 Angel Rama, Antologia de El Techo de Ia Ballcna (Fundarte Caracas, 19871. 11 - 36.
Esta idea se repite y se va construyendo como principia historiogrcifico en textos
que abarcan desde los catalogos de exposiciones La Decada Prodigiosa, Los Ochenta,
La lnvenci6n de Ia Continuidad, hasta trabajos monogrcificos de Milriil Elena Ramos y
Juan Carlos Palennrcla.
iO
10 Una excepci6n ha sido Ia colecci6n privada de Ignacio E. y Valentina Oberto, quienes han
constituido un archivo de documentos queregistran Ia trayectoria de El Techo de Ia Ballena
y de algunos performances de los anos setenta.
11 Juan Calzadilla ha propuesto incluir los rituales performaticos que realiz6 Armando Reveron
en El Cas trilete de Macuto, documentados par drferentes crneastas y fot6grafos, como
antecedentes del arte corporal en Venezuela. Aun considerando esta idea interesante, su
inclusion y desarrollo exceden el espacio y el objetivos de este texto.
12 Coincido con Ia aproximaci6n te6rica de Amelia Jones, quien consi?era el papel cuerpo
constrtutrvo de una subJetrvrdad exclurda del posmodernrsmo par teoncos asociadas aIa
revista October. Jones estima: "EI arte corporal es especificamente anti-forrnalista en
impulso, abriendose a los circuitos del deseo que informan Ia producci6n artistica y su
recepci6n. Los trabajos que envuelven Ia representaci6n del cuerpo del artista en toda su
particularidad sexual, racial y otras, y que abiertamente incitan los deseos del espectador
problematizan las estructuras y suposiciones enraizadas en el modelo formillista d~
evaluaci6n artistica." Jones, 50.
13 Me refiero a exposiciones ternaticas motivadas par una aproximaci6n comparativa que no
reduce ni privi legia el universo de obras escogidas a un e1e curatorial eurocentrico 0
norteamericano, tales como Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum, 1999). Wack! Art
and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art-MaMA PSI
2007-2008). Global Feminism (The Brooklyn Museum, 2006-2007) '
)
14 En contados casas estos autores publicaron una compilaci6n de los misnros como Elsa
Flores (Convergencias, Monte Avila, Caracas, 1983) o monografias sabre un even to
especifico como las importantes contribuciones de Maria Elena Ramos (Acciones frente
ala Plaza, Fundarte, Caracas, 1995) y de Juan Carlos Palemuela (Once Tipos, Academia
de Ia Historia, Caracas, 2002)
15 Una excepci6n es el articulo "Embodying Venezuela" de Maria Elena Ramos, publicado
en el volumen Corpus Delecti, Performance Art of the Americas, Coco Fusco, ed,
(Routledge London, 2000).
16 RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art, From Futurism to the PresPnt(N cw York Thames &
Hudson, 2005) I
17 lntegrado par Edmundo Aray, Alberto Brandt. Jacobo Borges, Juan Cal zadilla, Carlos
Contramaestre, Daniel Gonzalez. Salvador Garmendia, Adriano Gonzalez Leon, Angel
Luque, Gabriel Morera, Damaso Ogaz, Caopolican Ova lies y Francisco PerezPerdomo.
18 El proyecto de sociedad liberal burguesa impulsado par los signa tarios del II ;n ; 'oPacta
dr: Punta Fijo, alianzapolitica y econ6mica consignada en octubre de 1958 entred cjercito,
los empresarios. Iii igle;ia ',' los partidos politicos de centro-derechJ, exclu\tl d' Partido
Cr,r.runr sta Vent;:u!J!HJ (PC'/) La destdcaua participacion del PCV 1::11 Ia id' i! , '.;1tra Ia
1
tl'.:tadwa de P£rc, Ji" ,,.,,, r,o p~. J ~• a ::e~u r3r: e lll>a t Jotat!c prriH ,;n el rc'j',.r•· ~ ·nuevo
errJpn imugurado em, Ia prcsidencia c!cl sucialt!t•momta Romulo BetJnu ··
I~ La' lll d S nonhlu·; qui; <Li ;uuroniJs CXIJOSiCI0!11;;., rJe! !)rtq•o l err , Julio Le Pd·c. :,,New
J
'{or kGraphic Worl.shnp. r·ol~;ctiv a s donde part rei paron ar ti ~ tas wmo HansH<, '.'l·. Bruce
aurmn y las primeras rnuc.;tras importantes de los cilll!ticos Je,[rs Soto, :_:;· • ., Cruz-
Dit:l: y los 1onceptualistas venezolanos Hector Fuenmay r, Eugenio Espinm1·i ':laudio J
Penn Lourdes Blanco. "A 'alas enla Sala Mendoza", Cecilia Fajardo Hilly -\ix.J ~<i nche z,
8ds, SJia Mendo:a. 1956- 2001. 45 arias dr historia del artr conte 1ll{' '<. i wo en
Vune;ueld (Caracas Ediciones Sal a Mendoza, 2001 ), 108- 155. J
/ u R evi ~ tJ iumlacla pot ,\!eJamlro Owro c;n 1950 en Pan> Otero ptrblic6 cinco n•;p,f ·'" de Ia
r.,vista junto iilosartista' Pa·;cual Navarro, Maten Mdndrrre. Miguel Arro·,ro. l · Guevara
~. lore n0. r.nr!os GtHl ~~ lez Bngen, Narciso flebourg, Per cin Ermin\. Ruben .J:. ""z. Dora
Herscn, Aim6 Battistrni, adc111as de Ia bailarina cldsica Belen Ntn1ez, el rinr.JSl; Cesar
Enriquez y el estucliante cle filosofia JR Guillent Perez.
71 Solo al comienzo cle su gesti6n como directora del Museo de i\rte ConterT.porcineo de
Caracas, Imber favorec i6 programas como los fes tivales de video arte coord;na.Jos par
J
Margarita D'Amico donde participaron artista s latinoamericanos, Puropeos,
nortearnericanos entre los cualcs destacaban miembros del grupo Fluxus.
J
J
 ?2 Organizada por Peran Erminy y Juan C~lzadi l la, EsP,acios Viv1entes fue una exposici6n
- que llevaba al lim~te Ia vreJa drvrsron abstraccron-frguracron presente en el arte
venezolano de las decadas de 1940 al 1950 y cuyo debate fue liderado en Ia prensa
nacional por el artista Alejandro Otero y los escritores Miguel Otero Silva y Mario Briceno
lragorry Espacios Vivientes proponia el abordaje de Ia abstracci6n desde una ref lexr6n
existencialista de lo rnforme srn plantear una drvrsron entre lo frguratrvo como expresron
inclusiva y leg ible por el hombre comun y lo abstracto como lenguaJe fa lsamente
universal, elitista y por lo tanto reacci onario.
23 El manific:;to fundacional del grupo titulado Pareciera que todo intento de renovaci6n,
enunciaba Ia advertencia "Pareciera que todo intento de renovaci6n, mas bien de
busqueda o de experimentaci6n, en el arte, tendiera, quierase o no, a Ia menci6n de
grupos que prosperaron a comienzos de este siglo, tales como Dada o el Surrealismo. Si
bien es cierto que tenemos muy en cuenta estas experrencras, al fundar El Techo de Ia
Ballena, no pretendemos revivir actos ni resucitar gestos alos que el tiempo ha colocado en
el justa sitio que les corresponde en Ia historia de Ia literatura y las artescontemporaneas."
Angel Ram a, Antologia de El Techo de Ia Ballena (Caracas Fundarte , 1987). 49.
24 Pese a nodisponer de documentaci6n sabre los happenings cle Alberto Brandt, quien Iuera
miembro de El Techo de Ia Ballena. los criticos Juan Calzadilla y Peran Erminy han
sostenido que estos contribuyeron a preparar el terreno para Ia aparicion del arte
conceptual en el pais. Alberto Brandt. Cazador de Aves truces, catalogo, Galeria de Arte
N"cionJi, CaracJs.
25 Ana Longoni y Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tel/a a Tucuman Arde. Vanguardia artfslica y
polftica en el68 argentino (Buenos Aires El Cielo por asalto, 2000)
26 Rama, !bid.
27 Blanco, i'1i,f. 108-155.
28 Image·. de Caracas con cebida con Ia iclua brachtiana de intcrrupci on de Ia acci6n y
parti:ip.Jc ;on, en Ia cualloselementos teatral es yIns imagenescine matografict~ s estarian
fragmentados en el espacio y suscontenidos serian completados par el espectador, quien
ademas debia desplazarse para seguir Ia accion proyectada en varia s pantallas La
presencia de actores in situ completaba esta intencion.
29 El nucleo de colaboradores estuvointegrado par Jacobo Borges, Mario Robles, Juan Pedro
Posani, Josefina Jordan, Manuel Espinoza, Jorge Chirinos, Ramon Unda, Edmundo Vargas,
Ana Brurn!ik, Maricarmen Perez, Alvaro Boscan, Luis Luksic y Francisco Hung Para una
inform cion mas exhaust iva sobre este proyecto recomendarnos Ia lectura de Imagen de
Carac" · lristoria, imagen } multimedia de Marisol Sanz. Objcto Visual, cuaderno de
invest· ..'jrin de Ia Cinumateca Nacional. (Caracas) No. 3. 1996.
30 Este rn·· :tiesto fue publrcado en Imagen rid Cararas. A Umi!Le!'fact•, <~ rticulo firrnado por
lnocen t; Palaci os \ publir.ado en Thu D::;ma R,vfr!IL TOR, Vul. i .;, No.2. La:in An,ericarr
Thealr" (Winter, 1970).130- 137.
31 Posan,, ·:;:en comem6como dibujantc en lo:, arlos crncuenta e:1 el estuJio del orquilecto
Carlo' c.1> 1l Villanue <1, se cnr ontrilha Pn awel momenta colabordndo con Villanueva en
el diser." •le Ia Facultucl de Ciencia' Economicas y Sociale' de Ia Univer>iclad Central de
Venew :a (1967- 1979)
32 La ide: :ic LfUasi cincmd fue clesarrollada po1 He!io Oiticica en instalaci ones don de Ia
experi ' ~ . 1 del cine se liberaba r! ~l c•msurno pJs'vo e 'magenes \' frcL:onesalienante s.
Este t::\1 Je cxperiencid s concebida>par Oiticica lueron alentadas pnr Ia lectura de las
obras •l: Herbert lvlarcuse, el Teat1o tiel Opmnido de Augu,to BoaI 1 Ia recepcr6n de !as
ideas c Rrech' en Jean Luc GodJrd.
33 Este P' ·, tJy muchos otros fueron gentilrnente ac!arados por Bor~ws en una entrevista con
Ia auto: a de este texto reali zada en enero de 2008 en NY
34 Los actc·es en su rna \'oria eran gente cormin, integrantes del equipo de filmaci lin.
person>•' ·J ades del mundo del arte y Ia cultura inc!uyendo a Miguel Arroyo e lnoccnte
Palacio,,, qurenes encarnaron figuras historicas.
35 Par ejemp!o Ia relacion entre Bolivar y Simon Rodriguez era narrada a traves de un paseo
par un f1ello Jardin co lorida mientras que Ia ejecucion de Gual fue un episodio contado en
blanco 'r' negro
36 AI cerrar Imagen de Caracas, un conmovido Jacobo Borges deja de pintar por varios afios
y co-fund6 el partido politico de izquierda Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) y dedico su
tiempo a crear arte politico y agitprop
37 Durante el quinquenio de Caldera se prohibio Ia distribucion del film Ultimo tango en Paris
de Bernardo Bertolucci por sus contenidos pornograficos.
38 La muestra de Sosa se titulaba Siete Objetos 8/ancos.
39 Brasil, al igual que Argentina, Uruguay y Paraguay, era gobernado por un regimen militar.
En Nueva York, artistas radicados en esa ciudad como Luis Camnitzer, Gordon Matta-Ciark,
Mathias Goeritz y Loren10 Homar organizaron Ia contra-bienal como accion de repudio a
Ia dictadura.
40 Rafael Pineda, miembro del Cornite Pro Museo de Ciudad Bolivar, publico un articulo
titulado "No que me su obra" en el diario El Nacional, (Caracas) Viernes, 5 de septiembre
de 1969.
41 Antonieta Sosa, "Respuesta a Rafael Pineda", El Nacionai(Caracas). Domingo 7 de
Septiembre de 1969.
42 Dichas obras buscaban integrar al espectador en el significado de Ia obra tal y como Ia
plantearon experiencias realizadas par el Groupe de recherche d'art visuei(GRAV) en Paris
en 1966
43 Este tipo de agresion sexual por parte de un espectador masificado que transforma al
artista en idolo es anticipada par Yoko Ono en Pieza Cortada(Cut Piece, 1965)
44 Luciano Figueiredo, ed. Lygia Clark. He/io Oiticica. Cartas 1964-1974 (Rio de Janeiro
UFRJ, 1996). 57 a, 64.
45 Los rtistas participantes de Experiencias Visuales 68, colectiva cur ada por Jorge Rommo
Brest. decidieron destruir sus obras en Ia calle donde quedaba Ia galeria del Di Tella en
protesta par Ia censura a Ia obra El Bar1o de Roberto Plate presente en esa misma
exposicion y clausurada par Ia policia
46 Sosa, Ibid.
47 Marco Antonio Ettedgui, Encuesta, en Maria Elena Ramos, Acciones Fmnte a Ia Plaza.
48 Ambos eventos contaron con enormes presupuestos aportados par el Estado.
49 Alexander Alberro, ed, Conceptual Art(Cambridge MIT Press, 2000)
50 Plan Condor fue una politica estatal implementada rnayormente en Chile y Argentina por
parte de las dictaduras militares con el fin de detener Ia oposicion ideoiGgica durante los
aiios setent<l.
51 Se creo el programa de becns Gran Mariscal do Avacucho. el cual fornento Ia rnigracion
al exterior de estudiantes de clasc llleclia.
52 La prirnera edrcion se realizo enabrrl de I 973 y fue curada por Lourdes Bianco ilasta 1976
cuanuo dl renunciar a Ia direcci6n de Ia Sala Mendoza qued6 en manos de su sucesora,
l·.i.ugot Romer. Once Tif'Os fue un salcinque sc rcaiiz6 hasta 1981 cuand<, pasaria a ser lc
que ho·,- se conoce como Premia Eugenio Mendoza.
53 Si bien Ia moti acion de Blanco para organizar dicho salon fue mostrar alternativas
puntuales al artecon struct iva'I cinetico local a los rniernbrosdellntemational Council del
!vioMi\ reunidos en Caracas en 1973, este salon se convirti6 en aclelante en un reducto
para conceptualistas e in1eresados en practicas transdrsciplinarias y no·OiJJetuaiPs
54 Bldnco, Ibid ' 148.
55 Para deterrninar el irnpacto que tuvo este ,alor. dur ,nte per:oJo rr:cc.:1iendo re·"'ar c:
estudio monografico de Juan Carlos Palenzu ela, Once Tipos (Caracas: Acclderni a de Ia
Historia , 2002) y el catcilogo de Ia retrospecti a Arte Social, C!aud1n Perna (Car8c<ls
Galeria de Arte Nacional , 2004)
56 Espinoza habia reali zado el Impenetrable, tela pintada con una reticula que cuesti onaba
el model a de autonomia estetica del Penetrable de Soto.
57 Gabriela Rangel, "EI Mono Geogratico ", Arte Social, Claudio Perna (Caracas Galeria de
Arte Nacional, 20041. 66- 73.
5fl Elsa Flurus, Cunveryuncias(Cm<ILilS ivionte i\vila, 19831. U9.
59 Ibid.
 60 Estos problemas fueron especialmente crfticos durante el perfodo previa a Ia construccion
del metro de Caracas en 1983.
61 En 1970, Barboza realiz6 sus "poemas de acci6n" en conciertos de musica pop, parques y
manifestaciones publicas de Londres con muchachas cubiertas por redes o mafias de
col ores y mas adelante emple6 sombreros.
62 Olivier Debroise,ed. La era de Ia discrepancia(UNAM-Turner Mexico OF, 2006), 226-227.
63 Dados los multiples cruces entre performers y artistas conceptualistas de Ia region,
promovidos en los encuentros de arte no-objetual organizados por Juan Acha en esta
epoca, merece Ia pena emprender un rastreo mas sistematico de las obras de Zerpa en
Mexico.
64 Elsa Flores y Juan Calzadilla coinciden en esta aproximaci6n.
65 Amelia Jones aporta esta iluminadora lectura del performance Seedbed de Vito Acconci
como obra que representa este tipo de giro en Ia subjetividad Jones, Body Art, 136- 137.
66 Entrevista de Ia autora con el artista, noviembre 2007.
67 Organizado por Juan Acha en Medellin, Colombia y cuyo texto estuvo a cargo de Marfa
Elena Ramo s.
68 Durante los tiempos de Ia conquistc1 y coloniLacion del Nuevo Mundo, los espaiioles ibJn
con Ia esperanza de encontrar una Ciudad Dorada llamada El Dorado. La ciudad se
transforrn6 en un rnito, siendo a su vez utiliza do por los Amerindios para condenar Ia
ambici6n cle los conquistadores.
69 Alvare< es un de~tacado arquitcctu qui 11 forrnri parte de! equipo de CJrlos Raul Villanueva
y entre los ar10s sesenta y setenta drsarroll6 elaboradas instalaciones realizadas con
espejos que distorsionaban el espacio y destruian Ia integriclad del wbo blanco para crear
un ambito ilusorio.
70 Para mayor informacion refierase Flue. r8vista del Franklin Furnaceen el n[rmerod ~dic:1do
a artistas latinoamericanos (1981 I
71 Jones, Ibid, 214-216.
72 Maria Elena Ramos, Acciones. si p.
73 Elsa Flores sugiri6 esta idea rn el tex to repartido en una hoja durante Ia Bicnal ',' fu ego
reproducido en Com ergencias.
74 Una gran ausencia es Ia de Angel Vivas 1 rias. figura clave para el performance durantt iO'
afios setenta y ochenta . Su nomlw PS una omrsrrn vrnculada a Ia prccarredad rlL It•"
cr ntr~ ~ de im ctiqiiC:'Jil e'l Venewel1.

7: Hon•i f- Bl· ~ l· 1 u . N.1:ir ·: r• I N;rra:'nnII r•1d 0 ~ n au t l ~rlg c . 19801, 298--301

262
Condiciones, vias y genealogfas de los conceptualismos mexicanos, 1921-1993
Maris Bustamante
He defendido desde hace af\os q~e los no-objetualismos 1 no son solo nuevas
generos artfsticos, smo que tamb1en representan las nuevas formas de pensar Ia
realidad desde el arte y particularmente desde las artes visuales. En Mexico los
artistas que realizaron las primeras experiencias no-objetuales procedfan casi
todos de las artes visuales, caso diferente del espaf\ol donde casi todos los artistas
de performance procedfan del teatro de vanguardia Par esta yotras razones es que
Ia primera camada de artistas no-objetuales mexicanos todavfa hoy defendemos
que el performance no es teatro.
Como estas estructuras narrativas no tradicionales y no-objetual es fueron
desarrolladas par artistas denominados radicales, para muchos "impfos", a las
primeras tresformas no-objetualistas - performance, instalacion y ambientacion
-las he denominado como las "Formas PIAS" en 1993. Este termino, que parece
haber sido exitoso, e integrado en el vocabulario cotidiano, lo adapte poniendo
solo Ia primera letra de cada uno de estos medias. Me hac fa un chiste privado al
decir que las Formas PIAS, concebidas y realizadas par este nuevo tipo de sujeto
del artista iconoclasta, le hacfan un gran favor a Ia cultura nacional.
Las formas nuevas de razonar, percibir y sentir Ia realidad fueron reconocidas en
Ia uecada de los setenta, pero no se dieron por generacion espontanea Pueden
ser rastreadas en hechos y acciones cuya estructura reba saba entonces cualquier
forma ac ptada. Aetas de exhibicionismo, pseudolocuras, desplantes y hasta
humoradas, podfan ser las formas con las que se las identi ficaba. La estructura
a16gica contenida en elias se presenta ahara como una alternativa real a las
estructuras narrativas tradic ionales (logicas) sustentadas en el racionalismo
europeo, h yen franca decadencia.
Los no-objetualismos han requerido integrar varios campos entendidos antes como
disciplinas autonomas. El artista no-objetual es mucho mas complejo que el
trad icional Sus narraciones manejan otras l6gicas que las tradicionales y
requieren para su validaci6n de encontrar sus linajes hist6ricos, su genealogfa o
dicho de otra manera, su genetica cultural. La genealogfa de las formas PIAS no
corresponds a Ia de formas lineales. Por eso los artistas no-objetuales han sido
catalogados como radicales. siendo esta una caracterfstica que les es impuesta y
no ha sido propuesta par elias.
Tengo L1~a ti sfacci6n de hailer sido parte del Movim iento cle los Grupos en los
setenta. De hecho. cofuncle y trabaje en dos de cllos No Grupo2y Polvo de
GallinaNf:ora J La labor cle ruptura ; reali zacla entonces se percibe hoy casi como
nai've, lo cual 1ndica simplemente qu e las anteriores relaciones han siclo
superacl,:: . Casi todos los que participamos en este Movimiento nos
reconocfaiTIOSde izquierda aunque con muchas variantes, clesde Ia mas ortodoxa
y sectarca hasta Ia mas simple. Querfam os real mente construir propuesta s
ineditas, c;ortando de tajo Ia reproduce ion automatica que se noshabfa ensenado
desde Ia familia. Ia escu ela y Ia cultura local. lnevitablemente estabamos contra
el sister -,; '! asf se encargu elmi smo de hacernoslo saber tamb ien desdc Ia
famili a, : -oscuelo y Ia cultur a local
Son vari ~ las "pulsiones" que reconozco entre los queparticipamos en los grupos
Par eje::J:Jio, Ia de financiar proyectos e instituciones. el altrufsmo, el rechazo al
mercadu tradic iona l del arte, ampliando el abanico de opciones y buscando
mercados ineditos, Ia de trabajar por Ia equidad de genera, estudiando su
construccion en relacion con el cuerpo y Ia sociedad y el apoyo a jovenes
creadores. Aquf tratare solo una de el ias Ia de defendernos de las hegemonfas
culturales e historicas.
Ya sabemos que Ia "historia aceptacla" indica y "prueba" que fue en Europa doncle
se gesta1 on los conceptualismos; conocemos las formulas cronologicas
Vanguardia, Futurismo, Dadafsmo y Conceptualismo Pero aunque se deba a una
pulsion, es decir, a una tendencia o fijacion para muchos de negacion neurotica,
he insistido que en nuestro pais existfan condiciones suficientes para que se
produjeran los no-objetualismos por sf mismos yno por simple importacion lncluso
a veces funciono a Ia inversa hechos de indole alogica influyeron desde
Latinoamerica a Europa
El pensamiento europeo nunca lagro imponerse completamente en Mexico debido
a Ia existencia previa de Ia cosmologfa de Ia Dualidad mezoamericana.sTodavfa
hoy vemos los dos en coexistencia. Por ejemplo, nuestro sentido del tiempo y el
espacio es diferente al occidental Asimismo, las interrelaciones se expresan de
modo distinto. Como artista y como academica,6 buscar estas genealogfas no
europeas que alimentaron los conceptualismos mexicanos ha sido una de las
premisas de mis investigaciones 7
Los antecedentes de los no-objetualismos mexicanos se ubican a lo largo del siglo
XX, entre 1921 y 1993. El inicio de esta trayectoria marc a Ia aparicion de los
estridentistas, quienes vivian ypropiciaban situaciones no-objetualess El intervalo
se cierra en 1993 cuando fue fundado el Museo X-Teresa, primer museo de artes
no-objetuales latinoamericano. La institucionalizacion del genera en Mexico indico
que Ia tarea estaba completada y desde entonces me he dedicado a buscar
alternativas no-objetuales concretamente a traves de las transdisciplinas,
propiciando el trabajo con junto de artistas y cientfficos.9
A continuacion indicare brevemente cuales son las propuestas consangufneas
derivadas de nuestra genetica cultural que dan cuerpo a Ia historia de los
no-objetualismos en Mexico.
Linaje de las narraciones al6gicas'"
1921 - 1927 El Estridentismo 11
El poeta mexicano Manuel Maples Arce, a finales de 1921 , Ianzo el primer
manifiesto u "hoja volante", que encabezarfa el movimiento. Lo titulo Actual No I.
Fundamentalmente, era un manifiesto de rebeldfa que se proclamaba contra lo
establecido y, cle manera especial, atacaba las concepciones literarias
academicas. en particular el Modernismo, entonces imperantc. El prologo de 13
"hoj<J volante" inclufa fra ses provocacloras de contenido antipatri 6tico y
antirreligioso. tales como "Muera el Cura Hidalgo" o "AbaJ OSon Rafael" El
llamaclo de Maples Arce encontro ceo de manera 111mecliata :, Llamaron
Estriclentopoli s a Ia ciuclad cle Jalapa y se reun ian en el Ca fe de Naclie cuando
estaban enla Ciudad de Mexico.
Las similitudes conceptuales que he encontrado entm el estridentismo y las
Formas Plt,s son
Preocupacion por el problema de Ia renovaci6nde las actitudes y conductashacia
'!en losocial, y deIa renovaci6ncle las estructuras enlasnarraciones Jl1fst!cas;
Ahondar en las posibilidacles de Ia imagen;
Prescindir de los elementos logicos que mantienen un sentido explicativo, es
uecir, de Ia narraci6n convencional que se autoexplica;
lnteres abierto y sin tapujos par estar a Ia vanguardia;
Encontrar Ia "subversion tota l", no dejando realmente "tftere con cabeza",
segun expresiones que utilizaban;
Se opusieron al arden establecido y las concepciones acaclemicas literams, lo
cual darla el "permiso" para criti car las academias vi suales;
 Se asume al arte como urbana y cosmopolita, sin Iugar para Ia desinformaci6n 1928 iSaludy 30-301 19
o Ia lejanfa de los "pares". Los artistas hadan su trabajo desde su localidad Este fue un grupo de artistas que lanzaron el Primer Manifiesto Treintatreintista
geografica, pero estaban informados y aun ten fan relaci6n con los protagonistas para criticar Ia ranc ia academ ia artfstica y Ia obra producida par alumnos
de los movimientos europeos; profesores de Ia Antigua Academ iade San Carlos. Estuvo constituido par alumna;
yprofesores de las Escue las de Pintura al Aire Libre y los Centros Populares de
Segun sus propias pal abras "ya noes posible tenerse en capftulos convencionales Prntura, pnncrpalment~ lidereados por Fernando Leal, precursor del muralismo. En
de arte nacional"; l~ novrembre de este ana, en el Convento de Ia Merced y con Ia presencia del
Ministro de Educaci6n Publ_ica Ezequie~ Padilla, realizaron un protoperformance
Provocar virulencia en los feud as del poder cultural para llegar asituaciones extrem as cuando al pedrrse iAtencronl aparecro dando el drscurso de rnrcio el famoso
o, dicho con una frase estridentista, propiciar Ia "inminencia de un asalto".15 payaso Pirrfn manta do sabre un elefante El discurso que leiaestaba escritoen una
tira de papel enorme y criticaba Ia educaci6n tradicional. Este evento fue ideado
1924 Marfa Valente, Ia prestidigitadora de Ia musica por Fernando Leal, conocido par sus actitudes iconoclastas.
"De las mujeres del Ba-ta-clan, Ia que mas sorprende es Marfa Valente. lnterpreta
con los platos del postre, Ia verdadera musica que se debfa ofr en los finales de
los banquetes La musica de los platos y las cucharas, los cuchi llos y los trinches,
1936-1959 El lmperio de Tacubaya de Federico Sanchez Fogarty
Elllamado "Imperio de Ia llusi6n" consisti6 en mas de 300 fiestas de disti nto tipo
que es alga asf como Ia sfntesis arm6 nica de los banquetes", pone el poeta
realizadas durante 23 aiios y reunidas en Los Grandes Sabados, La Escuela
estridente Arqueles Vela.1r.
Imperial, las All Imperial y los Tes Locos Estas fiestas, a las que asistieron los
personajes mas conocidos de Ia epoca, incluyendo al presidente Miguel Aleman
1925 Venta de Mujeres par solicitud propia, se convirtieron en una tradici6n. Durante los Tes Locos, a
Una de las acciones mas recordadas de los estridentistas fue su Venta de Mujeres. partir de las 7p m en punta de Ia tarde, Sanchez Fogarty tocaba su fon6grafo,
En los ultimos meses de 1925, Arqueles Vela publico tres artfculos sabre el Estridentismo. colocandose frente ael ydirigiendolo con una batuta como un director de orquesta.
El primero, "Muestrario de mujeres", con ten fa una lista de precios rebajados de varios federico tam bien se proclamaba como Almirante de una escuadrade bicicl etas.
tipos de mujer. .. Vela no mencionael resultado de Ia venta, pero German List Arzubide
en "EI movimiento estridentista" (1926) anota que Ia tarde despues de fijarse los
precios, tuvo Iugar una subasta en el edificio clelrnovimiento estridentista.
1940 La Aparic i6n de Ia Esfinge de Ia Noche
Isabel Marin "vistiendo una gran tCrnica blanca y ocultando Ia cabeza ron 'lfla
enorme mariposa"io Esta acci6n ocurri6 en Ia apertura de Ia exposici 6n de los
"He aquf algunos modelos que hemos puesto a Ia venta y que se podran ver en
surrealistas en Ia Galerfa de Arte Mexicano y fue defendida como acci6n
nuestros escaparates senti mentales:
surrealista. Muy bien y hasta naturalrnente recibida, incidi6 en Ia m~ m oria
inmediata de Ia producci6n cu ltural y artfstica mexicana.
Antes Hoy
Preciosa Mujer De Manana $ 150.00 $ 75.00
1949 Mathias Goeritz
Sencilla Mujer De Mediodfa $ 135 00 $ 65.00
Mathias Goeritz naci6 en 1915 en Gdansk (Danzig) Po Ionia y muri6 en 1990 en Ia
Complicada MuJer De Tarde $ 200 00 s 99 99 Ciudad de Mexico. Lleg6 al pais en 1949 con una trayectoria ya conso! idada.
Ejerci6 una gran influencia tanto par sus prol'ectos como por su rnserci6n en Ia )
Delicada Mujer Para El Te s 140 DO \ 70 00
academia. Sus alumnus de Ia Universiclacl IIJeroa mericana y Ia Fae~ ; :t·!cl de
.I

Su ntuosa fVIujer Para El Soiree s 290 00 s 145 00 Arquitecturc cle Ia Universidad Nacional recuerclan Ia libertad. in form2cion e
Aleg re Mujer Para Sport s 120 00 s Go on irnaginaci6n de sus cursos. asi como su actitud humanista : Goeri tz ::u ria J
producir un "Arte Total" En 1958 rt3a li z6 con el arqurtecto Luis Barra( :1· Ia
Mujer Luctuosa Para Viuclos •'
,) 300.00 s 150 DO co1Jhoraci6n clc JcsC1s Reyes Fencir3la ronocidacscu ltura Torres r!e SatN·. ,, que
Mujer Pintoresca Para Via)eS ('

"
500 DO s 250 DO
sc convirti6 en uno de los emblemas de Ia ciudad · En1952 desarrollo El L ·. ::·1a
ecuaci6n en movimiento para el Museo Experimental de Ia UNAM. "manifitc3'!Jde J
Mujer Salida De Teatro ~ 9,000 00 s 4,000 00 Ia arquitectura emocional" que fue una de sus principales propuestas. Es
Mujer Para Calle s 80 00 s 40.00 importa nte mencionar tambi en su propuesta para Ia Ruta de Ia Amistad. u; 1d .; t~r i e
de esculturas monumentales por las Olimpfadas de Mexico 1968. que abmiar1 cl
Mujer "Castigada" En Balance s 60 00 s 30 DO camino al Arte Urbano y Transitable. En 1978 encabez6 el Proyecto del Espacio
Mujer Corriente s 25.00 s 1~50 Escult6rico de Ia UNAM. srenclo el primer proyecto universitario continen·;a! q'Je
consiclcrolas obras de los artistas visuales al mismo nivel que las investigac:11 ,.s
Mujer Estridentista s10,000 00 s 5.000 00" i; rea lizadas en las ciencias y las humanidades ;,r

J
1955 Primera Collfrolltaci6n de Arte Experimental
1926- 1931 Era de las Bal moreadas La Primera Confrontaci6n de Arte Experimental fue organizada por Goeritz Junto
Conchita Jurado se hizo pasar durante cinco aiios y tres meses par Don Carlos
Balmori Disfrazada de hombre y con Ia ayuda del periodista Eduardo Delhurneau,
con el pintor canadiense Lucien Parizeau en Ia Galerfa Proteo.75 J
que se hacfa pasar par su apodcrado, Conchita Jurado "balmore6 a las personas
ambiciosas que buscaban al becerro de oro, como Balrnori, mas rico que
Rockefeller, mas poderoso que Vanderbilt y Ford". 1-

' 54
J

1961 Los Hartos
Ete grupo reunido por Mathias Goeritz en Ia Galerla Antonio Souza26 estuvo
srmado por 13 expositores, que anteponlan una "h" a su ocupacion. As!, Matias
1
~a el hintelectua l; Pedro Friedeberg, el harquitecto; Chela Abascal de Lemionet
era hama de casa; Agripina Maqueda, hinstitutriz; Benigno Alvarado, el hobrero;
~ati Horna, conocida fotografa, era Ia hobjetivista; Jesus Reyes Ferreira, el
hembarrador de papeles; ?ctavio Asta, el haprendiz; el empresari~ Francisco
Avalos era hindustr~al yJose LUis Cuevas, hrlustrador. La partrcrpante numero doce
fue Hinocencia, una gall rna y su huevo.
1963 Alejandro Jodorowsky:
Hacia el effmero panico o isacar el teatro del teatrol"
Esta es Ia plataforma conceptual que indica el camino aseguir por las narraciones
artlsticas no convencionales en lo adelante
Si establecemos una relacion entre relaciones pictoricas y relac iones
teatralls, declararemos que el "eflmero" panico tiene como tare aabandonar
Ia figuracion y Ia abstraccion para llegar a una manifestaci6n concreta. La
nueva actitud plastica, Ia concreta, trata a Ia pintura como objeto, sin
repres'!, tar en su superficie, mas o menos estilizado, a un objeto exterior
al cuadro. En esta obra, una mancha es una mancha, un pajaro muerto es
un rea pajaro muerto y un color no simboliza estados espirituales ni
temper aturas Los llmites entre pintura y escultura se hacen ambiguos ylo
que el pintor produce es un "objeto plastico", en el que no solo emplea
materiiles pictoricos tradicionales sino que agrega trozos de Ia realidad
subord:nados a lo plastico, pero sin perder por ella su individualidad, sea
literaria, musical, etcu
Jodorows!.y plantea una estructura que oriente a actitudes no-objetuales, saque
conceptun!rn ente al teatro y a Ia pintura de donde estan len sus campos
disciplinarios) y los "junte" en un espacio conceptual a-disciplinario. De esta
propuesta neviene lo que el denomino entonces como Ia "estetica concreta", en
Ia que estas especia lidades adquieren un nuevo valor de "realidad" dentro de Ia
fantasia, es deci r, se elimina Ia ficcion y lo que sucede en Ia presentaci6n
(desapare::P. Ia representacion). sucede realmente en ese mismo momenta. El
sujeto se ,. !lvierteen objeto dr. su propuesta ~iendo responsable directo yen vivo
de lo que ~ :ooone il sus espectadores. Con ello, surge Ia estructura ineditil de Ia
"acci6n 1'' drtiStil" 0 performance (hijO direCtO del happening, perO lllaS
estructur<. '. ) que, a diferencia riel teatro convencional y de las artes visuales
como las"'· :oclamos, con forman la s nuevas estructuras al6gicas
1963 Deportivo Bahia: Manuel Felguerez y Alejandro Jodorowsky
El Deporti\-' •Bahia, ubicado en Ia Oelegaciun de lztapalapa, era de uso popular El
artista y cineas ta Geisen Gas propuso hacer algo en ese espacio Asi, para Ia
inauguraciA.n de un mural de Felguerez y con el apoyo de grupos de teatro
conocidos, Jodorowsky preparo un efimero que iniciarfa cuando el misrno como
personajeprincipal y vestido adecuadamente, se descolgarra por una saga desde
un helic6pHoen media de Ia alberca, leyendo un poem ade Lautreamont titulado
lgua/. Simdltaneamente se efectuarian acciones e improvisaciones, entre elias
escenas Ul los numerosos vestidoros, que seencontraban a lo largo de Ia alberca.
Encada ve tidor Ia puerta se abrirla y cerrarla, con iluminaciones diferentes que
permitirlan apreciar parejas interactuando, besandose, hacienda el amor. En Ia
mitad de I ~ alberca habra sido colocada una plataforma para una escena de
bailarines Durante un ensayo general el dla anterior, el pi loto del helicoptero se
acerc6 de :Pc~ s iado al agua, lo que provoc6 una enonne explosion del motor. Las
aspas del apa rato fueron lanzadas violentamente hacia las gradas de las tribunas,
que se hablan colocado !rente a los vestidores. Par fortuna, estaban sin publico.
El helicoptero qued6 clavado en el agua y ahl se dejo como parte de Ia
ambientacion. Para el evento asistieron al rededor de 1200 espectadores, que
aceptaron como muy audaz tal ambientacion. 1a
1963 Juan Jose Gurrolazg
Realizo su primera accion de artista acotada en 1963 como performance: Jazz
Palabra, con Juan Vicente Melo, Juan Garcia Ponce y Carlos Mons iva is. Artista y
arquitecto muy completo y siempre audaz, artista visual, escenico, conferencista
y voluntariamente "situacionista", Gurrola realizo innumerables acciones, entre
elias Due/a de flashes(1964), con flashes simultaneos con el de una fotografa de
Club Nocturno, Bar Los Lobos, en Acapulco En 1967, efectuo junto aJodorowsky
un recorrido desde un punta X al Hotel Tequendama en Bogota, Colombia, en Ia
pieza Frai/es Deja-vu Ambos iban vestidos de frailes ycantando sal mos. En 1974,
realizo el performance Cinta adhesiva en cruz sabre piedra, en colaboracion con
Arnalda Cohen y Geisen Gas. Este fue incluido en la pellcula Rabarte el Arte, que
se exhibio en Ia Dacumenta 5de Kassel, Alemania.
1967 Galerla Pecanins
Fundada en octubre de 1964 par las hermanas Marla Teresa, Ana Marra yMontserrat
Pecanins, quienes se establecieron en Mexico en el ano de 1950, procedentes de
Barcelona La galerla inici6 sus actividades en Ia Calle Florencia en Ia Zona Rosa y
se rnudo a Ia calle de Harnburgo 103 en 1966 y a Durango 186 en 1984.
Ademas de Ia pintura, Ia escultur a, el dibujo, Ia grafica, Ia fotogratra, el
video y el collage como tales, hay que considerar a Ia Galerla Pecanins
precursora en Mexico de Ia instalacion, Ia ambientacion, el arte-objeto
(durable, consumible o perecedero), el performance y Ia accion viva, entre
otras modalidades difrcilmente catalogables aun hoy, como el arte
comestible e ingerible, que estimularon Ia atmosfera creativa de los aiios
sesenta ysetenta, privilegiando mas el entusiasmo par Ia creatividad, que
el cometido comercial de su empresa. -·:1
1967 Mural eflmero, Jose Luis Cuevas
DeIa Gcneracion de IaRuptura, ,Jose Luis Cuevas, con amplia trayectoria objetual,
ha sido uno de los mas importantes precursores de performances, incidiendo en
Ia sociedad no solo a trav6s de los circuitos culturales, sino tambit!n de los medias
masivos. La que para muchos eran simples aetas de exhibicioni snto, otros los
reconocernos como acciones de artista del mas puro esti lo pre-no-obj etual
mexicano Recordemos ademas de su mural efrmero, Ia enmarcacion de Ia Zona
Rosacomo espacio geogratico transitable para artistas yescritores, su determinacion
conceptua l La Cortina del Napol, su candidatura indcpendiente, su rnarcamiento
grafico a reses, Ia exhibicion de su semen o el t~t uaje de rm!Jeres.
Cuevas es tal vez el unico artista visual vivn que ha conquistado Ia popularidacl
destinada a artistas de cine, boxeadores y actores y pcrsona1es a los que Ia
television hace famosos. La obtuvo a traves de acciones y desplantes, polemicas
y artrculos cuya estructura esta impregnada del esplritu de los happenings e
improvisaciones de los sesenta, que manejaban 'Ia abiertarnente la s alogicas
narrativas, con referencias a Ia cultura y chismografla locales. Las acciones de
Cuevas promovieron Ia aceptacion social de que los artistas visua les penetraran
el espacio publico mas alia de los circuitos que lesson propios.
Mwal Ef11nero (1967) se convirtio en una fiesta popular en Ia calle, ar1unciaua
previamente en los medias porIa galerra Misrachi Se invito al publico a reunirse
en Ia esquina de las calles de Genova y Land res en Ia conocida Zona Rosa, ubicada
en Ia Colonia Juarez. El espacio se convirtio en un Iugar de encuentro de
intelectuales y artistas. El mural fue realizado sabre un espectacular de usa
publicitario ubicado en Ia azotea de un edificio, en "respuesta al muralismo acedo
de Ia Escuela Mexicana". Segun notas de Ia prensa, se dieron cita fans,
vendedores, seguidores, curiosos, ambulancias, bomberos ypolicfas; presenciaron
este happening cientos de personas, con una amplia cobertura en los medios.oJ
1968 Primer Salon de los lndependientes
Fue una respuesta para lela al Salon Solar que se organizo oficialmente para las
Olimpiadas Se inauguro el15 de octubre en el Centro Isidro Fabela de San Angel
con obras de numerosos artistas, entre elias Felipe Ehrenberg, Helen Escobedo y
Manuel Felguerez.JL
Los propositos del Salon de los lndependientes fueron Ia busqueda de nuevas
formas de relacion entre el arte y una socieclad en evolucion. Su independencia de
toda institucion oficial y particular no lo excluia de colaborar con organismos y
personas. El Salon no perseguia fines politicos ni lucrativos; tenia caracter
internacionill, tanto par las diferentes nacionalidades de sus miembros fundadores,
como par sus propositos de intercambio con artistas de otros paises Se rechazo
el sistema de jurados que en ese momenta funcionaba prestandose general mente
a rnanipulaciones par intereses aj e1os al arte. La directora absoluta del Salon era
Ia asamblea general. Hubo otros dos salones en1969 con elllamado Arte Otro con
Sebastian, Hersua y Luis Aguilar Ponce, yen 1970, dedicado al arte pobre.
1968 Helen EscobedOJ3
Su instalacion urbana Puertas a/ Viento, de diecisiete metros de nltura, en
concreto, formo parte de Ia Ruta Olimpica, ubicada en Ia zona de Cuemanco,
Periferico Sur. Segun Escabedo, esta es su primera obra no-objetual, no
escultorica. Mas tarde, siendo directora del Museo Universitario, comisario Ia
representacion mexicana a Ia XBiennale de Paris (1976), form ada par los grupos
Proceso Pentagono, TAl (Ta ller de Arte e ideolog ia) y Tetraedro Este hecho tuvo
una importancia estrategica para el Movimiento de los Grupos
1968 Anticonferencia Par que pinto como pinto
(performance antifactum)
RGalizilda par Felipe Ehrenberg enla Pugola en Ia AI mecla Central, Gal eli deld
Ciudad de ~~l eA ico, como parte de Ia muest1 a l\ine' diigraiic . En 1973 Ehrt>Jibcru
se e.d1ibili a si mismo en su exposicion Artes t.,'hicles, Chocolates vCacahuatcs,
en Ia Sala Ponce de Bellas i Sabre su trabajo, afirma 'Desde que practico las
forrnas PIAS he tomado como referencia directa al tianguis, las ofrendas de Todos
Santos, Ia artesania, a los merolicos de Mexico y Latinoamerica. al Loco Valdes y
3 todo c! exctn:Jicismo popular sin cl cual cl p, is ','a huh era closop;1rcci-r". ·
1968 Marcos Kurtycz '"
Procedentede Polonia. II ega a Mexico en1968. En ese mismo ano conoce a otros
intelectuales polacos radicados en Mexico, como Ludwik Margules, Jan Zych,
Mi:lria Sten y Mariana Yampo b~y. Ya entonces liabia desarrollado trabajos COil
nuevas medias, que exhibio en Ia Galeria Contemporanea Wspolczesna en
Varsovia Algoritmos plasticos, (1968) Su exposicion Termolitograffas tuvo Iugar
ese mismo ailo en Ia Galeria Yan, de Ciudad de Mexico. En 1979, realizo una de
sus piezas clave, La muerte del impresor, artefacto, para el Salon Anual de
[xpcrimuntaciun, orye~Jii taclu pu1 ellnstilutu Nacionallle Bellas f1rtes (INBA)
1971 Tribuna de Pintores
La Direccion de Accion Cultural y Social del Departamento del Distrito Federal
inauguro el domingo 7 de febrero de 19711a Tri buna de Pintores. Estaba ubicada
en Ia explanada del Bosque de Chapultepec, donde ahara esta el Museo Rufino
Tamayo. Cad adomingo se daban cita los artistas, entre elias David Alfaro Siqueiros
Jose Luis Cuevas, Gilberta Aceves Navarro, Federico Silva, Mario Orozco Hivera'
Vlady, Benito Messeguer, Pedro Cervantes, Fanny Rabel, Lucio Costa y otros:
Hablaban de arte en Ia cal le, arte efimero y trabajo en equipo Algunos de elias
desarrollaron acciones !rente al nurneroso publico que se reunia alii yse suscitaron
declaraciones, discusiones y polemicas
1973 Tepito Arte Aca
Formado par Alfonso Hernandez, promotor cultural, Daniel Manrique, artista
plastico, y Carlos Plascencia, fotografo, este colectivo popularizo ellema "Conozca
Mexico, visite Tepito " Siendo uno de los barrios mas bravos, constituido sabre
todo par comerciantes, se convirtio en uno de los locos culturales mas impmtantes
en Ia decada Manrique pinto varios murales con Ia colaboracion de vecinos.
1973 Peyote y Ia Campania
Adolfo Patifioi 1 dirigio y coordino este grupo (Carla Rippey, Rogelio Viliareal,
y Armando Cristeto), representando y poniendo imagen y concepto a vari as de
las expectativas del moment~ En 1971 realizo un video experimental con P"yo:e
y Ia Compa11ia titulado Los Angeles tambien /loran, filme inconcluso sabre las
vicisitudes belicistas qu e enfrentaba el personaje ante su sociedad. ·J[J· '.urde
Patino fundo el Nucleo de Fotografos lndependientes, constituido por .,~int~
fotografos mexicanos, organizo exposiciones ambulantes y sesiones de fotoarafia
enla ca lle Tambien creo varios espacios independientes entre el los La Agt!ncia,
donde promovio artistas jovenes
1974 TAl: Ta ller de Arte e ldeologfa
Estuvo formado por un grupo muy diverso. ' Su ideologo fue Alberto Hijar. c1 itico
de arte y profesor de Ia Escue Ia de Arquitectura y Esteticas de Ia UNAM. F'Jr.;;iono
primero como taller de analisis y difusion de estetica marxista Desrues st: a' oco
almonta1e de obra s de teatro y aportaciones plast icas colectivas pa1 0 ,•r1var
movimientos de liberoci6n comn e'l Vietnam y Centroamerica
197 4 TIP Taller de lnvestigaci6n Plastica en Morelia, Michoe:.r.2n '
Desarrollo una intensa labor creando talleres y murales en comu11'J J;s
campesinas en Nayarit y Michoacan. Con organizaciones tales como pure1~~~· : 1s,
mixes y nahuatl, trabajaron en Ia defensa de Ia tierra comunal y Ia artic ula:i6n
de Ia cultura tradicional en Ia defen~a de su integriclad territorial. H,,s a
1984, rJroa nizaron museos comunales r.n I~ meseta tarilsril de MichoiiC'' n
Dolores Hidalgo, GuanaJuato Algunas de sus obras mas impactantes f· : ·nn
propuestas no-objetuales cuya incidencia politica tuvo repercusiones a favn ' , 1s
comunidades de Michoacan
197 4 Cesar Espinosa y Araceli Zun iga
A partir de este aiio, Cesar Espinosa y Araceli Zuniga realizaron el pr<JI, f' to
El TACO de Ia Perra Bra va, :· Del liberalismo artistico a Ia cultura popular,
desarrollado en tres eta pas A cada quicn Ia suyo (1974) consistio en editar una
revista literaria y de politica cultural integrada par escritores de ficci 6n y
pcriodistas Para Conceptualismo J hucvo (1975) acordoron escribir Ia histori1 _:C·I
fracaso, El proceso de Ia perra Se reunieron en Ia Peiia de Angel Parra y plancc~IOfl
 ealizar un acto publico con una exp~sici6n conceptualista, pero el proyecto no
runcion6. Par ultimo, a fmes de ese ano, tuvo Iugar Cultura smd1cal, una ser1e de
~onferencias sabre el tema ~urante el conflicto entre el Estado (en poder del PRI)
el monopolio de Ia telev1s1on pnvada (Telev1sa), Ia Escuela S1~d1cal orgamz6 un
~iclo de coloquios que se llama Med1os mas1vos y Comun1c~c1on, popular, tras el
ual se establecio una act1v1dad permanente baJo el rubro de Penod1co v1vo contra
fnformaci6n y respuesta" (1976)
1975 Reunion de Zacoa lpan, Morel?s ..
Con el proposito de orgamzar una expos1c1on de arte conceptual, el teonco del
arte Juan Acha, invito avarios artistas aparticipar en una reunion, Ia cual se llevo
acabo en Ia casa del pintor Zalathiel Vargas en Zacoalpan, pueblito del estado de
Morelos La experiencia permiti6 un acercamiento entre productores j6venes que
con distintas trayectorias ven lan trabajando desde diferentes flancos. Ahl
se encontraron Carlos Finck y Victor Munoz, que con Jose Antonio Hernandez
procedlan de La Esmeralda y hablan trabajado en equipo algunas instalaciones;
Ruben Valencia y Alfredo Nunez, de San Carlos, quienes se afiliaban al
Geometrisrno y al Conceptual ismo, futuros fundadores del No Grupo; Cesar
Espi 110 sa, Araceli Zuniga y Aaron Flores del TACO de Ia Perra Brava y miembros
eflmeros c~e l Arte Aca; Felipe Ehrenberg exmiembro del Salon independiente y
cofundador de dos grupos ingleses (Beau Geste Press, pionero en elaborar Iibras
de artista \' t:n el arte correo, y Pol igonal Workshop); Za lathiel Vargas, con una
larga trayectoriaen Ia elaboracion de obra-c6mic, dibujantede las Fabulas Pan/cas
de Jodorowsky, ymuchos otros. La Coalicion que se inici6 ahl dur6 solo seis meses,
pero indica : necesidad de encontrar formas de interrelacion entre artistas que
constitula nun ti po diferente de productor plastico Como resultado de Ia reunion
de Zacoalpan, se forma rondos nuevos grupos: El Colectivo yel Proceso Penti3gono
1976 Grupo Proceso Pentagono
lntegrantes los artistas plasticos Carlos Aguirre, Felipe Ehrenberg, Carlos Finck,
Jose ~.ntonio Hernandez, Rowena Morales y Victor Munoz, quien tambi en
hacla de te0rico Asimismo. el cinesta Miguel Ehrenberg y Ia fot6grafa Lourdes
Grobe!. Su instalaci6n Pentagono (1976-1977). ·1 fue realizada para Ia XBiennale
de Paris. cc,c, ~ is t io en un estand de cinco muros, donde el publico podia entrar \'
localizar e, 'llias cavetas objetos e imagenes alusivos a Ia represi6n en paises
de Americ,, 1_atina El ard en podia scr alterado por el pC1b lico. rnodificando en
cierto sen., \ • el discurso Una mesa y s1llas codificadas como inventario
administrc ' . y pintaclas con colo1 cs militares, aditarnentos electricos para Ia
tortura, en:.· ouas casas. redondcaban el interior del pentagono Compuesta par
mas de 2COJ piezas. Ia instalaci6n se hizo por duplicado para exhibirla
simultanear wnte en el Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes de Ia UNAfvl
en Mexico· 211 el Musee d'Art lv1 oderne de Paris
1976 Grt J Suma
Sus mien ' ; se crmoc ieron en el Tall er de Experi rnentaci6n Visua l y Pintura
Mural (Lr; Ja de San Carlos). a cargo del pintor y maestro Ricardo Rocha.·:
Pasaron rl . 1:0 aulas a Ia calle coni a idea 1nicial de llevar sus pinturas al pC
1
1blico
urbano y p ,~eri mentar frente a los transeuntes. Con objetivos sociales pero sin
participar c:,111 ingunmovimiento o partido particular, los trabaJOS desarrollados
por Sumaevolucionaron desde un estilo abstraccionista inicial hacia un rea lismo
figurativo infl uenciado par el entorno. Utilizaron planillas en las que registraron
muros ybanquetas; tam bien fotograflas en col lage, objetos ytextos encontrados
en las cal irs. Algunos de sus integrantes abandonan el ~Jrupo para desarrollar su
obra persr'nal y entrar al mercado comercial cle las galerlas. El grupo reali zu
numeros a ~ obra s efimeras. principalmente pinturas murales en ba rd as
de las calles de Ia capital En el Taller de Ia ENAP y San Carlos produjeron Iibras
Cmicos y libros-objeto.
1977-1982 Grupo Mira
Desde su fundaci6n el grupo Mira43 se form6 con Ia idea de recoger las experiencias
de los diferentes participantes en un Proyecto Gratico sabre Ia violencia en IaCiudad
de Mexico. Dicho proyecto se propuso para participar en el Salon de Experimentacion
convocado par eiiNBA pero fue rechazado par el jurado de selecci6n.
1977- 1983 No Grupo
El No Grupo estuvo trabajando de 1977 a1981 Surgi6 de Ia fiebre grupal de Ia epoca
a ralz de un encuentro en Ia casa del escultor Cuenado Hersua, quien habra sido
invitado aparticipar en el Homenaje aGunther Gerszo del Salon de lnvitados. Hersua
extendi6 esa invitaci6n a los que frecuentaban su taller y asl se realiz6 el primer
evento del No Grupo. Despues de Ia segunda presentacion, varios participantes se
separaron y para el Salon de Experimentacion, soloquedabamos cuatro4 1
Entre 1979 y 1983 realizamos once propuestas. En cada una se repartieron textos
a los presentes JUnto con pequenos objetos para que los espectadores
contribuyeran desde su Iugar y Iuera alga ludico y hasta divertido. El humor era
alga muy serio y form6 parte de los eventos, que a partir de 1979 denominamos
Monta;e de momentos plasticos.
Ademas de los textos. rea lizamos carte les y bol etines Los objetos con que se
presentaban las tesis e hip6tesis visuales eran elaborados a partir de materiales
muy baratos. 1s
Simultaneamente al trabaJO artlstico, el No Grupo particip6 con textos y propuestas
graficas en varias revistas, como las de LACE (Los Angeles) y Artes Visuales
del Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico) Asimismo. comunm ente visitaba las
redacciones de los peri6dicos llevando cartas para que se divulgaran sus
posiciones Asl, logramos una presencia cada vez mas activa en los medias
impresos En 1981, el grupo fue invitado a participar en el Primer Coloquio
Latincamericano de ArtP No-Ob;etual, CIIYfJ prcsidcnte fue J11iln Aclla :'
1978 Grupo Mar~o
S1 enclo Sebastian maestro de Ia Escue Ia Nacional de Artcs Pl c1sticas (ENAP) de Ia
UNM,1, organiz6 un grupo con Ia idea de reolizar eventos en Ia ciudad Sus
integrantes fueron Sebastian, fv1agali LarJ, Manuel Marin, Gilda Castillo, Mauricio
Guerrero yAleJandro Olmedo El grupo estuvoactivo de 1978a 1980 y sus acciones
consisticron enlo que denominaron Poemas Topograficos, en cuyo ordenamiento
el pLiblico participaba.
1979 Primm y unico Salon de Experimentaci6n
Organizado par Oscar Urrutia al frente del Departamento deArtes Plasticas deiiNBA.
1979 La Patente del Taco, Maris BustamanteJ'
Este fue el primer performance social realizado enla television comercial, Televisa
Para realizar un homenaje al invento gastron6mico precuauhtemico, Ia registre en
Ia Direccion General de Derechos de Autor en Ia Ciudacl de Mexico. Asi, me declare
'1a duena universal de Ia imagen formal y visual del taco"
 1983-1993 Polvo de Gal lina Negra
Este grupo de arte feminista fue fun dado par Monica Mayer~s yMaris Bustamante.
Con una larga trayectoria como artista visual y feminista, Mayer habfa realizado
notables abras no-objetuales. En 197 4, Ia acci6n plastica Se Exponen fue una
actividad paralela a Ia muestra de alumnos de artes visua les en Ia ENAP Varios
expositores pegaron invitaciones fotocopiadas en las que aparecfan retratados
individualmente (toto de maquinita) con su numero de cuenta de Ia UNAM. Tambien
hicieron un gran pastel que se coloc6 en el centro de Ia sal a, adornada con confetti
y serpentinas. Par otra parte, en 1978, Mayer desarrollo Ia instalaci6n El tendedero
como parte de Ia exposici6n Nuevas Tendencias(Museo de Arte Moderno. Mexico)
Consisti6 en un tendedero de color de rosa con papelitos colgados con clasicas
pinzas de madera. Los papelitos contenfanlas respuestas de cientos de mujeres al
cuestionario "Como mujer. Ia que mas detesto de Ia ciudad es ... "
El grupo Polvo de Gallina Negra (o PGN) trabaj6 de manera consistente entre 1983
y 1991. Las primeras acciones fueronla participaci6n en manifestaciones, siendo Ia
primera en contra de Ia violaci6n. el 7de octubre de 1983, en el Hemiciclo aJuarez.
El nombre del grupo se referfa a los polvos que se venden en los mercados
tradicionales par las 'hierberas" en pequenos sabres prometiendoprotecci6n contra
"el mal de ojo" Relacionando el mal de ojo con nuestra profesi6n de artistas
visuales y en media del salvaje machismo mexicano, parecio suficientemente
humorfstico adoptarlo y darlo a conocer publicamente
PGN tuvo como objetivos principales modificar Ia imagen de las mujeres en los
medias masivos de comunicaci 6n a traves de acciones o performances en radio.
television y medias impresos; rescatar Ia obra de mujeres artistas contemporaneas
y del pasado; hacer valer las condiciones y reclamos de las mujeres en Ia sociedad
patriarca lmediante propuestas artfsticas no-objetuali stas y con temas como el
trabajo domestico, Ia maternidad, los quince anos fundamentalmente •q
lndudablemente Ia acci6n que identific6 al grupo fue Madre par un dfa (1987).
realizada en una televisora comercial como parte del proyecto ;Madres' Se
escogi6 a Guillermo Ochoa, periodista muy conocido par su noticiero diario en
Televisa y con el cual habfa presentado La Patente del Taco en 1979 La acci6n
consistio en convertirlo en "madre" colocandole un dclantal con una panza
artificial de embarazaclo, durante aproximarlamente 20 minutos. El Sr Ochoa se
convirti6 en el primer mexicano ernbarazaclo pnr artistas feministas.
1985 Nucleo Postarte: Primera Bienallnternacional de
Poesfa Visual y Experimental
Este evento se realizopar esfuerzo yestimulo de Cesar Espinosa yAraceli Zuniga
En vistade Ia casi nul a experiencia y practicade Ia experimentacion visual
poeticaen estc pais. el cquipo de trabajo Nucleo-Post-Arte (Cesar Espinosa
coordinador, Araceli Zlu1ig3, Leticia Ocharan. Maria Eugenia Guerra. Cosme
Ornelas \' Jorge Rnsano) convoc6 durante 1985 a Ia cclebraci6n de IJ
Primera Bienal de Poesfa Visual y Experimental en Mexico, en raz6n de
que tal es disciplinas practicamente se encuentran ineditas en el ambito
nacional . Mas alia de Ia exposicion de poesia concreta internacional
prornovida par Mathias Goeritz en 1966. ademas de otra dedicada al
concretismo brasileno en Ia Casa del Lago a mediados de los 70, han sido
escasos y fall idos los intentos de vincular a los artistas visuales con
aquellos que cultivan Ia palabra escrita. ~L
La muestra debio abrirse en1985, pem par los sismos so aplazo su i11auguracion ilasta
1986. Se recibieron mas de 1500 rolaboraciones de casi 500 autores de 40 raises, con
58
exposiciones completas, Iibras, revistas, antologfas y ediciones colectivas
grabaciones, objetos, etc.SJ Los trabajos partian de Ia letra yonomatopeyas visuales'
seiiales ygeometrfas, textos y tramas de letras conjugados condibujos, sellograffas'
mimeograffas, fotocopias. La Bienal se ha realizado en ocho ocasiones. ·
1989 Artefax I y Artefax II. Arte por Correspondencias1
En el mes febrero, a 30 anos de que se diera el arte correo, se present6 el
proyecto Artefax dentro de Ia exposicion Electrosensibilidad, efectuada en Ia
Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda. Consisti6 en
el intercambio previamente concertado entre Ia sede de Ia escue la y las
ciudades de Baltimore. en Estados Unidos, Copen hague, Dinamarca, e interior
de Ia Ciudad de Mexico. Para ella se fijaron los numeros correspondientes de
fax yelrnejor horarioescalonado, para Ia transmisi6n en tech aestablecida, en
este caso, el dfa de Ia inauguraci6n. A esta cita concurrieron por Ia linea
telefonica 12 artistas de las ciudades mencionadas.
Para Artefax 1/,cs se invito par teletono aun grupo de nueve artistas que transmitieron
sus obras desde diferentes sedes en Ia misma Ciudad de Mexico. Fueron recibidas
escalonadamente durante Ia inauguraci6n de Ia exposici6n CompuJiartc '89
mostrandolas al publico que antes sus ojos descubrfan una a una.,~ ·
Ambas exposiciones (Artcfax ly II), mostraron Ia realizado en materia d~l usode
las computadoras y su aplicaci6n al arte yal diseiio, con Ia cual el conceptode arte
no-objetual se trastoca. AI intermediar el fax entre Ia obra ysu presentdci6n fisica
esta se desmaterializa convirtiendose primordialmcnte en una vision p,opositiv~
de lo que un autor a distancia expresa. :1
1993 1nauguraci6n Museo X- Teresa
Ubicado en el Antigua edificio del Hospital de Jesus, Centro Historico de IaCiudad
de Mexico, este fue el primer museo dedicado a las artes no-objetua lesyse debi6
al proyecto y gesti6n antes las autoridades de Eloy Tarcisio.
Tarcisio, quien tambien fue su primer director, llabia desarrollado una larga
trayectoria como promotor ciP. las artesvrsuales de vanguardia. De1gn a 1978,
par ejemplo. particip6 en Ia fundaci6n del Centro delnvestigaci6n y Expn ni" lllaci6n
Plastica deiiNBA. Organiz6 exposiciones de ar r. alternativo en S!' ~ st• 1rl io de
Licenciado Verdad No. 11 - 15 I1986·- 1987) fVI~ s tarde. trabaj6 como c1 ":dor en
el Museo de Me tvloderno I1987 - 1988) y en 1992 coordin6 cl c. :·r ,, ,o de
p~:;rformance en el Mu~co Uni ersitario cU Chnro Cun Ia creaci6n dt:i .·: :'CO X-
Teresa. las artes no-objetuales lograron institucionalizarse en el pais.
"Aries No-Objetuales·· es unterrnino utili;aclo sobre toclo en Lutin0amr>ricay fu, p!Gruesto
por eltt-oricu J ran ,\cln
Cnfunrle el No Grufl8 C'> :l \i 1::•do ~l !:f:r•z. M.!rr, a ~t. .. i ·, " "r.J ·,· r. ub ~n '.',, ' ~' : .•. ~ : i :ode
1977 il 1983.
Co fundi wnM61 .ica "-Llyu Po:vodeGilll:n,JNL~ra. g;upu ric arte fcminista a,:tivo r:· ~ ~N , J 1993.
Crco que Ia llamada Generaci6n deIa Ruptural1963 - 19751 en realidad no rOJ;,,,i(.sino que
substitu 6 generacionalmente unos arlistas par olros. Los artistas que rr. r'"''' ·i Jron a
ese grupo lo hicieron a Ia manera de una exposici6n colectiva, no para encnntrar Puevas
formas de ex presion. srno para encontrar Iugar en el mercado del arte interna iorn l.
5 La Oualidad rnezoamericana, arden y cosmologia precuauhtemica. es simboli,arJ,, por Ia
Coatlicue. Diosa Dual de Ia cultum rvl exira.
 Fui Profesora en Ia Universidad Auto noma Me~opolitana Unidad Azcapotzalco duran!e
30 anos, Division CienclaS y Artes para el Dlseno, Departamento EvaluaCIOn del Dlseno
en el Tiempo
Desde 1993 he realizado in~estigacio n es sabre el tema, reunidas en el Pr~mer lnventario
de /as Formas Pfas en Mex1co (Performance, mstalac1on y amb1entac10n 1922-1993.
lnedito.l
Los sujeto; alogicos de hoy nos reconocemos mas en los estridentes que en los artistas
del Movim i~ nto Mex1cano de Pmtura, cuyos esfuerzos denvaban en objetos.
He desarrollado este proyecto durante quince anos, prim era desde el Centro Nacional de
las Artes (CENART-CONACULTA) y mas tarde desde CAHCTAS, SC Centro de Artes
Humanidadss y Ciencias en Transclisciplina, primer centro con estas caracteristicas en Ia
Ciudad de Mexico, wwwcahctas.org
Extracto de mi texto Arbol Geneal6gico de las Formas Pias, 1998.
10
German Li ,t Arzubide, entrevista porIa autora, Ciudad de Mexico, 1994. German List
11
Arzubide y Luis Mana Schneider han escnto extensamente sabre el mov1m1ento Estndente.
Ver: Gerrrr'111List Arzubide, "EI Movimiento Estridentista", Lectwas Mexicc~nas (Mexico
OJ Secrr taria Educacion Publica, nurn. 76, 1987); German List Arzubide, El Movimiento
Estridentis!cl, ed. facsimilar (Mexico DJ Federaci6n Editorial Mexicana, 1980); Luis Mario
Schneider, El Estridentisrno, Mexico 1921-1927(Mexico,OJ lnstituto de Investigaciones
Esteticas, UNAM, 1985)
12 Miguel Hidalgo fue un cura catolico ramonay lider revolucionario mexicano. Esconsiderado
par muchos mexicanos com~Padre de Ia Patria y fue elmciado~ del muvimiento par Ia
Guerra deL1dependenc1a me.x1cana, que corn bat1o el dom11110 espanol desdecom1enzos del
siglo XIX
13 Ael se unieron German List ArLullide, Arqueles Vela, Luis Ouintilnilla, -que siempre firma
sus texto>como "Kin Tan1ya" -, Salvador Gallardo, lvilguel Aguillon Guzman, Franc1sco
Orozco Munoz, Salvador Novo y Humberto Rivas, dentro del genera literario. Asimismo.
RamonAlvade Ia Canal, Leopolda Mendez. Fermin Revueltas, Diego Rivera, German Cueto.
Jean Chalic', Roberto Montenegro, Guillenw Ruiz, Javier Guerrero y Maximo Pacheco
entre los plasticos. Tambien algunos musicos, Manuel M. Ponce y Silvestre Revuelta s.
14 Texto de .'lrljtleles Vela, Universal llustrado, 12 de noviembrc de 1925.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Luis Cer, .. 'S Uorales. Ah•t"<l.·:iJsde t'a,!rs Ba:'me·i (l',it•xico OJ T:~l l !' res de Co:tJ·i\'l'iC
Editor, 1!· .
19 Laura G• · ~ e z ivlatutc ha 1 11\~ stiq d.lo i · \hrl ~ "ti·1a me nt ~ este temd . recuj'UJndo
documr; : ·,· :0togra fia' cit. L1 cp•'<::l .
20 Isabel r' . . l··crmilnJ iJUILIC'I lCI c!. GuadJ!IIp8 f·. hrin, r ~i/1 11 r:l e ~ ro ' il dr! D;eu•J Ri,,na
(1924), 8' . d deWolfgano Pa c~l e n c1r11 qa c intelectual austnacoque pnrticip6 con Bretun
en el rh , ; 'nto Surredlista de Paris en 1936. Llego a Mexico exiliado en 1940.
21 La fot6gr:: Lo;mles Grobet en iu Univcrsiddrl lberoilmericdllil y el e;cultor Sebastien en
Ia Facul: , : ' · r\rqu1Lstu: a de :a UN,\1,;1ustaban con 8ilo".
22 lomas d ( ·tel!'e c:. u•1a url'J ni,Jci6n 'ipin .ir' Ia Era•·a dP' cmo!l'' tl dL :a~ ~ · Ia
presidero '<lr M1gucl Alemiln (Pres1clente 1946 ·1952); est,i situ adii en Niiucalpan rle
Juarez, 1 -~ i norte ciG Ia riudad.
23 El Museo E' oerimentol El Eco (1 952- 1953), patrocinado par Daniel Mont, fur; conceiJICi o
como Ut i -.,,'ilcio museistico con servicios tales como restaurdnte y bar. En else pi<Jsm6
Ia concei. _j r• que Goeritz tenia sobre Ia integracion una coordinaci6n arquitect6nica y
plastica, · il''' de literJtura .,- m·"ica. Ver Mathias Goori t7, Un artista plural h!ms y
dibujos, ~ , Graciela Kartofel (Mexico OJ. Conacultii. 1992)
24 Enese mcmPnto era Rector de Ia UNAM el Dr. Guillermo So be ron Acevedo.
25La primera ~aleria en Ia Ciudad de Mexico fue Ia de lnes Amor en 1935, a Ia que siguieron
Ia Galeri'l Pr.,teo (1954) 't la de Antonio Snu7il (1959 I
26 La Galeria Ge Antonio Souza era en los sesenta Ia galeria clomle sucedianlas propuestas
mas inter ,_:· 1tes.
27 Alejandro Jodorowsky, "Hacia el 'efimero' panico o jSacar el teatro del teatrol," prologo
en Teatro panico(Mexico OJ Era, 1965)
28 Manuel Felguerez, Arnalda Cohen y Geisen Gas, entrevistas par Ia autora, Ciudad de
Mexico, 1994-1997.
29 JuanJose Gurrola fue un actor, director de teatro, cineasta, dirigi6 opera y promotor de las
artes alternativas mexicanas.
30 Tornado del Luis Carlos Emerich y Galeria Pecanins, Galerfa Pecanins, fa siempre vivaz
(Mexico OJ Turner Libras. 20001
31 Jose Luis Cuevas, entrevista par Ia autora, Museo Cuevas, Ciudad de Mexico, 1997. Ver
Maris Bustamante, "EI mural efimero de Jose Luis Cuevas, treinta anos despues", Revista
Viceversa (Mexico OJ abril. 1997)
32 Participaron Juan Luis Bunuel, Myra Landau, Arnalda Coen, Toni Sbert, Felipe Ehrenberg,
Kasuya Sakai, Francisco Corzas, Francisco lcaza, Francisco Moreno Capdevila, Mariano
Rivera VelazqueL, Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguerez, Roger von Gun ten, Fernando Garcia
Ponce, Gilberta Aceves Navarro, Gabriel Ramirez, Gaston Gonzalez, Lilia Carrillo, Alberto
Gironella, Leonel Gongora, Rafael Coronel, Antonio Espaiia, Fel ipe Orlando, Enrique
Echeverria, lker Larrauri, Arnold Belkin, Lucinda Urrusti. Benito Messeguer, Pedro Preux,
Vita Giorgi, Lucas Johnson, Luis Jaso, Philip Bragar, Jose Munoz Medina, Ricardo Rocha,
Regazzoni, Marta Palau, Olivier Seguin, Bartoli, Brian Nissen, Vicente Raja y Luis Lopez
Loza Dona ron obra pero no estuvieron en Ia exhibici6n: Jose Luis Cuevas, Angela Gurria,
Guillermo Meza y Leonora Carrington
33 Escobedo se define como escultora ambiental. Estudio en el Colegio de Mexico, tomando
clases de escultura con German Cueto estuvo becada par tres anos en el Royal College of
Art, Departamanto de escultura, en Londres, lnglaterra; en 1954 obtuvo el Diploma ARCA
(Assoc1ate of the Royal College of Art) Directora del Departamento de Artes Plasticas del
Museo Universitario do Ia UNAM. Coordinadora de Museos 'I Galerias de Ia UNAM;
Oirectora Tecnica del Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) de 1981 a 1982 y Directora del
Museo de Arte Mode rna de 1982 a 1984. lnvestigadora del Centro de Experimentacion en
Arte Urbano. UNAM. Mexico do 1980 a 1981. Desde su fundacion en 1979 particip6
formando parte del grupo de escultores del Espacio Escult6rico, UNAM. Mexico, OF. Fue
elegida como Miembro Asociado de Ia Acaclemie Royale de Sciences, Lettres et Beaux
.1\rtes de Belgique en 1986. En 1991 obtuvo Ia Beca Guggenheim.
34 Ehrenberg fue aprendiz y asistente de John Martin (Canada) y Erich Duooen (Aiemania).
realizo estudios incompletos enla Escue Ia de Artesanias EDA deii ~~BA con los maestros
Jose (pintor) 'I Tomaslescultor) Chave Morado, el brasileno Emilic.no de Cavalcanti. Tuvo
un desmrollo ulterior empirico Miembro fundador del Poligonal Workshop en lnglaterro
11969-1971). FundJdor del BeauGeste PrPss(1970 197!) AcompJI1iintecercano deFiu.< us,
de 1970en a d ~ l;m te . Ehrenberg fue fundador del qrupoProceso Pentagono (activoclo 1976
a 19831, cle Ins Tall2res de Comunicilci6n Hc.ltns iH2rJ) Ornos 11980-1986) Fue clecl.nacln
Llie:T1brn honor:;no r1e i\rt!O ia<mr>- CiliW dr. P1n1ur.1 ;\i:rosol1gr,ifi ca (AMP!\) en 1989.
3!i ~~ l1p e Ehrenberg, ent1 ev:sta por Ia ciUIOra. C iu dc~ rl rlv ivlc\ico, I ~g/, 1997.
36 I~JCiti con elnombre de Jan Kurt 1cz T1efen1Jruner en Pl e lgrzymo\'lic,~, en el clis trito de
PslCZyna enPo!onia y muri6 tierancer el 13 de rnar 10 cle 199G en Ia Ciudad de Vle1.ico De
ascendenc1a juclia. <;U familia era catLilica par conversion. Casi tocla su familia par Ia linea
materna fuevictim<J clei hrJiocausto. En1952se qraclu6 co rna tecnico industrial especialista
en maquinas herram1entas ·; en I 957 1eciiJ iu el titulo de lngeniero fV1 ecan1co en el
Pnl tccnico de Varsrr.'l. De I 9S8 1 1% l rnali76 il' \ 8s l :g ~ ci0'1 P <: en cl campo de Iii
n1etrolonia tecnica en c! ln; titut,J de ~:le can1ca de PreLi, i6n E:n Va rs ovia. Llega a Mexico
en septlembre cle 19ofl po1·,arlj:lcu en el t:a:,a! lciniiCO~olaniC .l y en octullre pide una
pro1 :0ga de GO dias. Ubtiene fa niL onol il aclonnJexlcana en 1980. En Julio de 1990, s ~ le
cliagnostica un neunnoma del11erv1o facial (tumor en el cerebra) el cual requeririi cle cirugia
Comienl ounacercana relaci6n de am1stad·ypacientecon el Doctor Carlo Pane, con qui en
colallora en el diseiio de Ia presentac16n de su ca so enun congreso. En abril de 1991 se
le reali za Ia cirugia del tumor.
37 Patir1o fue autodiclacta. 01ganiz6 el grupo Pe ·ate y Ia Campania, asi como el Nticleo dr>
Fot6grafos lndependientes (Patino, Cr~ s t e to. Lourdes Grobet, entre otros) En 1977, el
Nt1cleo participo en Ia Secci6n Bienal de Gratica. Salon Nacional de Artes Plasticas, Museo
Nacional de Bel los Artes. INBA. ~exico, OJ
 38 El TAl estuvo formado par Isabel Estela Campos. relacion comunitaria, Ariadne Gallardo. 49 Las propuestas uti lizaban medias no convencionales. como conferencias. envios postales
periodista. Jose Luis Gutierrez Pena. maestro de artes plasticas. Cresencio Mendez Gaspar. y aun par fa acientos de personas de manera rutinaria, entre los que habia intelectuales
historiador. Juan Manuel Olivos Campos. maestro de artes plasticas. Rene Olivos. artistas y personalidades de los medias masivos. Asimismo.la asistencia a programas d~
administrador publico y los artistas plasticos Jose Luis Soto eIgnacio Eleazar Soto Campos television y radio, Ia publicacion de articulos en revistas feministas como FEM y otras
Destaco una serie de treinta y seis conferencias realizada Iuera del Distrito Federal.
39 Los participantes en el TIP fueron Jorge Bustillos. dirigente sindical, Armando Castellanos.
patrocinadas par Ia Direccion General de Promocion Cultural de Ia Secretaria de Educacio~
historiador de arte, Adriana Contreras. cineasta. Enrique Echeverria, artista plastico. Cesar
Publica. Fue titulada Las mujeres artistas mexicanas, a se salicita espasa. en referencia
Galvez. profesor de filosofia. Alberto Hijar. teorico. Cecilia Lazcano. historiadora. Felipe
a! hecho de que tradicionalmente los artistas hombres cuentan con una esposa que les
Leal. artista plasti co. Andres de Luna, critico de cine. Ana Maria Martinez. profesora de
permite el dedicarse a su obra.
teatro, Dolores de las Penas. internacionalista. Maria Isabel Perez. cientifica social. Rini
Templeton, artista grafica. AtilioTuis. disenador y Alberto Vargas. profesar de filosofia 50 El proyecto jMadres' comenzo el 10 de mayo de 1987. Para hablar de Ia maternidad
necesitabamos estar embarazadas.lo logramoscon cuatro meses de diferencia y"el apoyo
40 TAC.O .. Taller de Arte y Comunicacion.
solidario" de nuestros maridos.
41 Los autares eran Felipe Ehrenberg. Carlos Finck. Jose Antonio HernandezAmezcua yVictor
51 Alrcdedor de 200 millones de espectadores vieron Ia acci6n en Mexico y el extranjero.
Munoz. coni a colaboracion de Miguel Ehrenberg.
Las lineas telefonicas de Ia televisara se llenaron con multitud de llamadas. muchas de
42 Sus integrantes fueron Oscar Aguilar Olea. JoseBarbosa. Paloma DiazAbreu. Rene Freire. elias en rechazo de Ia que consideraban una Ialta de respeto a Ia maternidad.
Oliverio Hinojosa. Armand ina Lozano. Gabriel Macotela. Ernesto Molina. Alfonso Maraza.
52 Tornado del catalogo de Ia Bienal. editado par Ia Direccion General de Difusion y Relaciones
Cesar Nunez. Hirman Ramirez. Armando Ramos. Mario Rangel Faz. Santiago Rebolledo.
Publicas del Departamento del Di;trito Federal en diciembrc de 1986.
Jesus Reyes Cordero. Ricardo Rocha. Jaime Rodriguez. Arturo Rosales. Patricia Salas.
Alma Valtierra. Luis Vidal y Guadalupe Zobarzo. 53 Los trabaros se presentaron en el Auditorio A de ld Unidad Zacatenco clrl Institute
Politecnico Nacional. Ia Pinacoteca de Ia Universidad Autonoma de Puebla. Ia galeria
43 Los miembros del grupo fueron Arnulfo Aquino Casas. Eduardo Garduno. Melesio Galvan.
Ramon Alva de Ia Canal en Ia Universidad VeracrUlana. instalaciones de Villa Primavera
Rebeca Hidalgo, Saul Martinet. Salvador Paleo. Silvia Paz Paredes. Jorge PerezVega.
de Ia Universidad de Guadnlarara y en los foros culturales del Departamento del Oistrito
44 Maris Bustamante. Melquiades Herrera. Alfredo Nunezy Ruben Valencia. Aunque Katya Federal
Mandoky todavia estaba en el grupo, se decidio que no participara par responder a Ia
54 A continuacion una li>ta par paises de los participantes de Artefax I. Dinamarr~: Etienne
convocataria del Salon. El No Grupo rechazaba IJ ostructura de losconcursos y •n su lugcJr
Bondy y Dodi Romanty; Estados Unidos D.S. Bakker. Richard Ellsberry Tryzno. Steve Stes,
propuso realizar una actividad colateral. Durante esta presentacion. sin embargo. Mandoky
Gabriele Hourticolon y Douglas Retzler·Eian. Mexico: ~1ari ' Bustamonte. MarcoA Godinez
realizo una accion provocati va. consi stente en colocar un sujeto dentro de una jaula. Esto
(Tzara). Daniel Mamano. Cuauhternoc Salgado y Miluric io Guerrero.
Ciluso Ia separacion definitiva del grupo. En cuanto a los demao. despues de participar en
Ia exposici6n La Muerte del performance(1983). en el Museo de Arte Moderno. decidimos 55 ParticipantPs en Artefax II: Maris Bu,tamante. . ndrea di Castro. Aaron F'nrr",, .\lberto
separarnos en el mes de diciembre. Alfredo N(Jiiez se fue avivir a Los Angeles. California Gutierrez. Melquindes Herrera. Blanca Naval. Cuauhtemoc Salgado. Jose de Santiago,
y los demas permanecimos en Ia ciudad de Mexico. Ruben Valencia. quien Iuera mi Sebastian y Mauricio Guerrero. todos de M()xico
companero desde 1977. fallecio victima del cancer en 1990. Melquiades Herrera muri6 el
56 Se presento el 24 de rulio del misrno iliio en Ia Galeria Metropolitana de Ia Uni ,ersidad
18 de octubre del 2003. · ut6noma IVletropolitana.
45 En ocasiones se utilizaron rollos de positivos fotognificos. que permitian trabajar en escala
57 Tomado delreporte sobre el proyecto Artefa,i elaborado par Mauricio Guenero y editado
1:1. Una vez que se obtenia un master. reproduciamos las imagenes par media de maquinas
en noviernbre de 1989 par el Departamento de lnvestigacion \ Conocirnientr para el Diseno
heliogrcificas que eran utilizadas sabre todo para los pianos de arqu itectura y que eran
de Ia Divisitin de Ciencia' y Arte; del Diseiio. UAM-Azcapotlalco
muy baratds. De esta manera podiamos hacer obra muy grande y a muy bajo costa
58 Eioy Tarcisio nacio en1955enla Ciudatl de t\18xico. D.F. Reali16 estudiosde ai k. 1i~ sticas
46 Este evento fue rralizado en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin. Colombia. En el
enla b:uela i~ar ional de Pintur'l y Esru 1twal1 Esmera!'!l de 1973 a 1Q77. G1r·., c: ~ 1975
porticipilr"n tilmb:en notable accionistas ldtinoilmencJnfJs como Leopeldo ~. la !c'. ~.!ar ta
r.l Primer Prwnio de pin tura y mcncion lionnri; iril de dibUJII en cl XCwlc~trso .'v :::onal de
f•1irrr;·:1y Juan r. 1nilo Uribe. rccirnte•.ente f llrr.i d ~ . P01 f.k<ico . . rt ic i1w~: l Prr··.~ ' r
:1riC yen 1981 Llencionlionori;icc enel Pm11,;,' cllwentro tie Artc Jm ' II. En 1~· • : ~ dcibi6
Pr· nt~gn ll'J.I~ o Grupo. ~.l,,gali Lor a. c:QP!po Esp.. cio Escultorico. Felipe Eh re nb~rfi '/ Ritil [ J;:
lal;or;; rle! FUNC.J. en lo r!HdaliJml dt. Cre:1 Jore' lntel,>rlu.11esy Artisti::n;,.
47 i.'icrri .; !h:ti>nl(lfllt) Cotud;) Ia l illie! adt. 1\rWs Pl<istiD'> ell Ia E'cuciil .Jdcional rl•: rintrll<l
y E1cullura La Esmemlda de 1968 a 1973. A los trece ar1os inicio sus rs tudios de l'inturo
\ d1bujo run Ia pintora Angdlina Groso exdi ~d pula del pintor ~~pilii ol Jose Bar ,iasar.o.
Desde 1980 inicio su carrera academica como profesora en lil Universidad Aut6nonw
Metropolitana. Unidad Azcapotzalco en Ia que trabajo durante 30anos. ObtuvoIa Beca de
CrPadores lntelectuales y •rtisticos del FONCA (1990-1991.)
48 Monica t\1ayer estudi6 A rt c~ Visuales en Ia Escuela Nacion I de ,\rtes Plas icos de 'r:
U ~J ,\J.;I (EN,\P). En 1980 oiJtt.vO Ia lllili'S li i<, en Soci o:ogia ric: Artc c.1i t~ Ur1:1cr .:;.ldd tit.
Goddard. Particip!J dos aiios en el Feminist Studio Workshop en Los Angel s. Cillih r,ic.
Fundadora de Ia Gilleria de Au tor Pinto mi Rayay del Circuito Cultural Condr. ~ ~ . MMP' h
realizado critiLa de arte desde una columna en el peri6dico El Universal. Como remini:< td.
tenia antecedentes en mujeres de surmsma fam ilia Su abuela paterna ysu madre habicJn
lucharlo par los derechos de Ia mujer Con elias solia ira marchas y plantones

270
 aulatinamente fue incorporando nuevas miembros. Su finalidad era no solo
~rotestar abiertamente ~antra una coyuntura politica insost~nible, sino generar
resi6n social y medratrca, despertando concrencra polrtrco-cultural en Ia
~iudadania Entre las acciones mas significativas llevadas a cabo por el CSC se
encuentran El en tierra de Ia ONPE y Lava Ia bandera. La primera consisti6 en el
velorio yentierro si mb61ico de Ia ONPE (Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales)
el9 de abril del ano 2000. Gustavo Buntinx Ia describe asL "Durante veintiocho
horas miles de personas sembraron cruces, prendieron velas, hicieron guardias
de par6dico honor en torno al ataud adquirido por colecta popular "zzSe diocomo
respuesta rapida ante Ia indignante y evidente manipulaci6n fraudulenta de los
resultados de las elecciones presidenciales por parte del gobierno.
Lava Ia bandera fue un performance politico que present6, ademas, una estructura
temporal incluyente, yen ese sentido, se asemej6 a un ritual religioso. Cualquiera
podia unirse al acto de lavar publicamente Ia bandera nacional en una bate~ de
plastico rrovrsta por el Colectrvo Socredad Crvrl. Esto se llevaba acabo en un area
potenternente demarcada y transformada por una acci6n domestica23 transpuesto
al espacio publico de mayor caracter simb61ico en Ia ciudad de Lima Ia Plaza
Mayor junto a Ia fuente virreinal y !rente al Palacio de Gobierno, Ia Catedral y
Municipalidad. Una vez lavada, Ia bandera podia ser col gada en un cordel instalado
para ella,: La naturaleza politica exigia Ia participaci6n popular para que Ia
resonancia alcanzara su mayor amplitud La identificaci6n con el acto hizo que
numero~as personalidades, tanto de Ia politica como del trabajo cultural y del
mundo mediatico local, asi como tambien personas comunes y corrientes, se
sumaran a el. La participaci6n de cualquier individuo quedaba determinada par
su conc: -;ncia de si mismo como sujeto politico, con Ia noci6n adquirida de novo
de ejerc'H o ejecutar un deber clvico-moral de oposici6n simb61ica, que en el
contextoaparece como fundacional de Ia asuncion de Ia ciudadania.
Ante Ia ausencia de referentes tempranos puede decirse que, a fines de los anos
setentil, se inaugur6 localmente una manera de abordar el performance que
involucraba con mayor frecuencia ca lles y plazas. En Ia decada de 1980 surgirian
acciones individuales y colectivas centradas en el cuerpo como material de
producci6n cultural Hasta Ia fecha, Ia identidad y Ia memoria aun tienden a ser
abordarl:1 s en Ia medida que sirven para una representaci6n vinculada a los
escen?r>·s social y politico, a traves de sus roles, iconos, emblcmas y simbolos.
Lo aut ·jiugrafico no alim enta del toclo una praxis del cuerpo en un contexto
cultur;L 'l el que Ia individualiclad recien cmpiezaa ser e~plorada como instancia
de defi ,ion politica. El sentido cle colectiviclad emerge so lo esporiiclicamente.
En el Pc ·r, frente a Ia cles~::structuraci6n percibida de Ia vida en sociedad, el arte
ha prov ~r ;do un coqJUs fragn1entado
En un texto escrito para el Primer Ca/aquia Latinaamericana de Arte Na-Objetua/, de
Medellin, Colombia en mayo de 1981 el critico peruano Alfonso Castrill6n, al hacer alusi6n
al caso peruano menciona Ia influencia de Romero Brest. Dice: "Hay que destacar par esa
epoca (1964-1965) Ia llegada a Lima del critico de arte argentino Romero Brest, quien
dicta algunas conferencias y sembr6 cierta inquietud en nuestro media. La respuesta no
se hizo esperar cuando un grupo de j6venes estudiantes de arquitectura (Miguel Malatesta,
Juan Acha, Efrain Montero) organizaron en ellnstituto de Arte Contemporaneo (lAC) una
e posicion de vanguardia llamada MIMUY Esta muestra definitivamente marco un pun to
de inicio en las actividades de los grupos de vanguardia de los sesenta en el Peru. Ver:
Alfonso Castrill6n, "Reflexiones sabre arte conceptual en el Peru y sus proyecciones"
Letras, (Lima 48,88-89, 1985), 21 - 29
2 Actualmente se esta desarrollando un interesante cuerpo de investigaci6n en torno a las
vanguardias peruanas de los sesenta y los setenta, en u~ jntento de reposicionar un
periodo hist6rico que habia quedado eliminado de Ia historia oficial del arte en el Peru.
En Ia muestra curada par los criticos Miguel Lopez y Emilio Tarazona titu lada La
persistencia de Ia efimera se dio un primer acercamiento a facetas desconocidas de estas
decadas. En ellibro Accianisma en el Peru, 1965-2000. Rastros y fuentes para una
primera cronalagia Tarazona incluye el happening de Felipe Buendia como uno de los
puntas de inicio en su recuento exhaustivo (casi a modo de catastro) de lo hecho en este
campo. Sin embargo, nosotros consideramos que dicha acci6n es mas cercana a una
situaci6n de carnavalizaci6n y fiesta con fines satiricos/ir6nicos en una vena criolla,
desarrollada en el contexto de un vemissage
3 Velasco Alvarado dio asu junta militar un sella ideol6gico total mente distinto, se propuso
hacer Ia revoluci6n par el proletariado, Ia llamada "tercera via" ni comunistani capitalista.
Fue un experimento militar inesperado en el panor made creciente militari aci6n a nivel
latinoamericano. que en otros paises tuvo tragicas consecuencias
Los trabajos de Teresa Burga y de lvonne von Mollendorf sonexcepciones en el marco de
Ia 2poca. Autarretrato. Estructura-lnfarme 9 6.72 (1972) de Teresa Burgd es Ia primera
propuesta de rte conceptual centrada en el cuerpo femenino como sujeto de examenes
medicos a manera de autorretrato. Par su parte, Ia bailarina lvonne von Mollendorf
realizaria una danza narrada en el espacio del lAC, 1970, donde en un discurso termina
declarando Ia falsedad del arte y Ia cultura en relaci6n al hombre y enfatiza Ia necesidad
de una revoluci6n cultural.
A Wiley Ludefia, Hugo Salazar del Alcazar y Armando Williams se uni6 Rossana Agois,
quien no habia participado en Ia e. posicion Signa x Signa
Cabe seiialar que Ia ciudad de Lima, para 1980 ya habia experimentado un cambia radical
en su fisionomia producto de un fuerte proceso de migracion interna que se inici6 en Ia
decada de 1960. Esto intervenci6n de Lima c>n un ar!Jul fue presr ntada por Alfonso
Castrill6n en el Coloquio de Medellin de 1981 r.omo uno de los representantcs del no
objetudlismo en el Peru.
Formada en1981, tenia corr.o rniembros aCharo Lu a, Luc1 Angulo. Jose An tonio 1orales
1· Ana Maria deIa Fuente, entre otros. Para Ia oxposici6ncle 1983 en Iagaleriil de Ia Alianza
Fr:;ncesa, Angulo ·,-l\1oraies entcrblari,m relacion ceq un pdr de enfermos mentales. madre
e hijo, que ocupaban un terreno llald1o en cl di>trito de Mirafl ores.
8 El critico peruano Augusto del Valle. en un texto inedito escrito parJ Ia exhibicion Urbe &
.4rh:. ilnaginaria' de Lima en Transfarmaci6n (1\luseo de Ia Nac16n. 2006), al halllar del
trabajo del grupo, sostienL qu ~ "Los fluidos urga nicos so:1alt!gor;as que nos remiten .!
iconos que lo" miembros del grupo vinculcrn il fiqura sculturab como Arrru edas oVallejo.
pero tarnbien il Santa Rosa rle Limil ·, IJ JklSion de Cr1s o. La alusiorr a Ia vioiPncra politica
t n cs ta forma de no·objetu·lis!:,J :oe ~· <~o. . .ic :1 . ::J :r..iirr. ;:. J p:;; ,k ~' cru,ie_~ de In
ab ecto, introduciendo palle de ia bt8 ti~d :li s :Jo~: e de: !>vrr1::.1iismo sin<ilat.a par Ia
fotografia y Ia imagen de lo in forme "
SergioZevallos en una entrevista concedida a Ia r ~v ista Protesis en el aiio 2005sefiab que
el desarrollo rle una iconograffa alrederlor de Rosa de Lima es suya, y que tiene un cariz
autorreferencial. AI respec to dice: "creo que fui uno de los primeros en elaborar una
iconograffa abundante sabre el caso de Rosa de Lima desde una perspectiva de Ia
apropiaci6n de Ia idea colectiva con fines de usa particulares: los de Ia autorrepresentaci6n
y Ia redefinici6n de mi propia persona. AI hacer publicas las imagenes, estas se enajenan
nuevamente de rni persona y se convierten en parte de Ia iconograffa sabre Rosa de
Lilllcl ... P1otcsls·(Lin1u Ar\o :J ! N 3. diciumilre del20051
 10 Par otra parte en 1987, Ia tercera Bienal de Trujillo, a/ norte de Lima. hizo eco del F 20 En su individual titulada Grandes Planes para el Futuro en 1992, Santisteban rea /izaria
Encuentro Latinoamericano de Arte No-Objetual y Arte Urbano de Medellin (1981), e par primera ve . su accion de llenar una pared con palates a modo de con teo yIa registrarfa
intento introducir el performance latinoamericano. Ademas de Roberto Valcarcel (Bolivia), en video.
estuvo invitado Carlos Zerpa (Venezuela). quien no se presento. Pero sf Ia haria Carlos
21 Sabre Ia conformaci6n del colectivo Buntinx sostiene que en el "confluyeron Fernando
Leppe (Chile). que no estuvo originalmente invitado. El unico peruano en rea /izar una
Bryce, Gustavo Buntinx, Claudia Coca, Luis Garcia Zapatero, Jorge Salaza r, Emilio
performance Iuera del marco de Ia Siena/ fue el musico Manongo Mujica, quien inspirado
Santisteban, Susana Torres. Abel Valdivia , Tambien Natalia lguifiiz y Sandra Ventura
en acciones Fluxus quemo y enterro un violfn en Ia playa Huanchaco.
tuvieron una participaci6n importante en e/ tramo inicial de esa experiencia "Ver: Gu; 1avo
11 En una entrevista concedida a Abelardo Oquendo en 1981 y a este respecto Eielson
sostiene "el ambito de Ia poesfa es infinito, aunque Ia forma, el molde, el codigo que Ia
Buntinx, Ibid , 98. 1
22 Gustavo Buntinx, Ibid.
contiene sea diferente y reciba apelativos convencionales como musica. poes fa, pintura,
teatro. ballet, etc. Todo esta, creo yo, en aceptar que e/ termino poesia noes privativo del 23 Resul ta irnposible con respecto a ella no pensar en e/ dicho popular "los trapos sucins se
lenguaJe verbal y de el solamente." Ver ''Eie/son: Remontando Ia poesfa depapel," Hueso Iavan encasa".
Humero N910, (Lima: jul-oct 1981 ). 3-10. Jorge Eduardo Eielson fallecio en Ia ciudad de 24 La accion se /leva acabo cada viernes desde el24de mayo a/25 de noviernbre del aiio 2000.
Milan en el afio 2005.
12 A este respecto Santisteban sostiene que su trabajo pretende "desatorar en sentido
figurado las ineptitudes. dificultades y corrupciones que hacen disfuncionales las
relaciones entre ciudadanfa, sociedad civil y Estado, e inoperantes las instituciones y
organizaciones co-responsab/es del destino nacional." La acci6n esta pensada para ser
repetida de modo cfclico en el tiempo. Ver http//www.emiliosantisteban blogspot.com
13 En el primer video-performance el artista con Ia cabeza ocu/ta baJO una caja de carton de
transporte de tarros de leche evapomda rnarca Gloria se aproximo a una pared. tom6
impu/so y golpeo repetidarnente su cabeza envuelta en Ia caJa contra ella. En el segundo
video-performance se distingui6 borrosarnente un cuerpo a/ interior de un cilindro de
p/astico blanco de proporciones considerables. En Ia inauguraci6n de Ia muPstra. un
estudiante de Ia Escu Ia Nacional de Bellas Artes empez6 a simular foneticarnente Ia
/ectura del texto en ruso incluido en Ia invitacion-ca talogo. El entonces curador de arte
con temporaneo Carlos Leon Xirnenez simu/6 hacer Ia traducci6n simultanea de Ia lei do en
supuesto ruso. aludiendo a las desapariciones par "evaporaci6n" de La Cantuta. Leon
Ximenez termin6 su traduccion simultanea y empez6 a gatear mientras repetia
insistentemente que tal vez todos correrian Ia misma suerte. pero insinuando que quizas
habia c6rno evitarlo. Esto desencadeno una reacci6n esponliinea en los asistentes. Se
cortaron mechones de pel a con una tijera que iba pasando de mana en mana. El cabello
en el pi so se acumu/6 considerablemente y una pilreJa de estudiantes de Bellas Artes le
dio Ia forma aproximada de figura hurnana.
14 Uder del grupo paramilitar Colina, que Iuera responsab/e directo tan tode las desapariciones
forzadas de Ia Cantuta como de Ia matanza de Barrios Altos. El sobrenombre de Rivas Ia
adquirio dada su predi /ecci6n par Ia utilizaci6n de este combustible para quemar los restos
de las victima' de 1us torturas. Transferee/a de identirlad(ldentitr Transfer). oiJra en video
arte ue V illan~ s I1997). inclu•,e Lilla v8l ll as el f[JStro de Santiago ivhn:n Hil uo tl trJvr's t!e
•rna prc,Lcc:·in ·:o/1 re el cuerp1 t > 'l~ i do li!l an .sta.
15 Juan Jal·ier Salazar pertenecio a losrolectivosrarentesis'I E.P.S. Hua'i CO Pdra un es tudio
detCJIIado ric estos co!ccti ;ns , ~ u co nt e x t~ •,r,r GLstdvn Buntinx. "E PS. /lu,r, ro.
Documentos." fwntns para fa /-h;ton:1 dd A11e Peruano /Lirm Coleccitin ~ll iln ucl L!ore', ra
Loredo. ton10 3. 2005)
16 El titulo del traiJajo era Ensayn ,fe recupcraci6n de n:oleculas de ,1DN en hcn'ltecitus de
ra ta I. La venta riel cassette tuvo Iugar en/a galeria Parafcrna lia.
17 La ace ion se llevo a cabo en Ia Facultad de Letras y Ciencias Hurnanas de Ia UNiv/SI.L
1o Vestia un tra 1e h ~c !.o de Ia telac,n in ,presion ' "rigr,ificaric: rnuro inc:a icc qt1 t Ju;,nJa,a·r
Sala1ar hal1ia producido trps afios antrs.
19 Emmgcncia artistica fue una muestra autogestionada de arte critico que se desarrollo
corno even to para/c/o e indepemliente rle Ia II Bienallberoamericana de L1ina de 1999.
En palaiJras de su curador. Gustavo Buntinx. fue "concebida desde Ia vocacion mayor ric
consolirlar un consenso dernocratico contra/a censura y el autoritarrsmo." Vcr Gustavo
Buntinx, 'lava Ia bandera y el derrocamiento cultural de Fujirnori 'I :ontesino;, "
Ouehacer, N'' 158 (Limcl enero-feiJrero. 2006). 99. Tambien cabrfa ser1alar que algunos rle
los artistas participantes en Emergencia ,;rtistica serianparte fundamental de Ia forrnaci6n
del Colectivo Sociedad Civil en el afio 2000.

j
!4
 Arte y acci6n en Chile: La subversion del orden, el performance del cambio
Robert Neustadt
La escena de Ia avanzada:
La neovanguardia de los setentas y ochentas
camenzanda por el Happenmg de las gal/mas en 1974, el artista Carlos Leppe
-uno de los primeros art1stas en usar su cuerpo como media en Chile- realiz6
una serie de acciones que desafiaban las ideas trad icionales y los tabues
asociadas con el cuerpo, Ia sexualidad y el genera 1 Leppe fue Entonces Ia
comunidad artfstica entraba en un perfodo de intensa experimentaci6n en
respuesta aIa dictadura de Augusto Pinochet. Aunque muchos estaban de acuerdo
eA ver el arte como un vehfculo para oponerse a Ia represi6n de Ia dictadura, Ia
cuesti6n de como y con que tipo de estetica provoc6 un serio debate.
Como obse1v6 el artista Carlos Altamirano, el enemigo no podfa ser Pinochet,
porque el dictador era el enemigo de todos y era intocable.2Como consecuencia,
el arte tradicional se convirti6 en el enemigo simb61ico, pues lo asociaban con el
tradicionalismo de un Orden autoritario. Los artistas de Ia neovanguardia chilena
comenzaron atacando el concepto, Ia idea y las imagenes de ese arden a traves
de estrategias multiples y variadas.J
Laobra personal de Lotty Rosenfeld es un ejemplo de un arte que trastorna Ia
represent~c i6n del arden. En 1979, Rosenfeld convirti6 las lfneas de las senales
viales de ura ca lle en cruces y el sfmbolo matematico de Ia sum a("+") en su acci6n
Una milia de cruces sabre el pavimento. El gesto aludfa a las muertes ocasionadas
.I par el regimeny al mismo tiempa subrayaba Ia noci6n no siempre obvia de que el
arden en sf es un discurso semi6tico. 1
PorIa mis.11a epoca, Juan Castillo empez6 a mezc la1 artt; con graffiti popular.
Castilloescr ibi61a frase "seiialando nuestros margenes" en terrenos baldfos por
toda Santiago Mas adela nte, Castillo proyect6 un video de esta acci6n en un
escapara te comercial, uniendo asf los m~rgenes arquitect6nicos y sociales al
centro urbana de Santiago.>
Tambien en 1979, Raul Zurita escandaliz6 al mundo del arte con su acci6n en Ia
Galerfa CaL durante un panel sabre Ia pintura de Juan Domingo Davi la. En Iugar
de particil'ar con una ponencia academica convencional, Zurita acompan6 su
intervenci·m titu lada No puedo mas con una foto de su propia cara, mutilada y
cubiertar·),l su propio semen que recolect6 masturbandose frente aun cuadro de
Davila. C:·n este gesto corprJral, Zurita intervino en Ia noci6n del arden,
interrwrri ',ldo, tanto literal como n1ctoforicamente, Ia interpretacion academica
Luego dr c:rectuar quemaduras y COI1Cs en sus propios brazos y piernas en 1980,
Diamela!:Itit realizoun performance como parte de su novelaen proceso, Lump6nca,
en un bu:del de Ia calle Maipu Su rostra era proyectado simultaneamente en el
exterior ue daba a Ia calle De esta forma yu ·taponfa Ia literaturay Ia prostitucion,
al tiemptl que transformaba un burdel en un centro cultura l AI cortarse, Eltit
mutilaba13 integridad de sucuerpo, destruyendo simbolicamente Ia imagen ideal
de Ia flk !)-' l:il el disc ur~o oficial lficticio) Lk un Chile unido. Eltit realiz6 incisiones
en su c.- ,~·oltex to para subravar ellugar y condici6n marginal del cuerpo socia l
en el C'' :~ de !J dictatura .
Laaccir : ;le Carlos Altamirano, Transito suspendido, rea lizada en 1981, llev6 el
canon d[ i arte chi lena a las call es y lo "blanqueo "Altam irano us6 imagenes de
cuadros ch ilenos de Ia colecci6n del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes y desde el
!echo los proyect6 en una gran tela en Ia acera enfrente de Ia Galerfa Sur, en
Santiago Durante Ia proyecci6n, escribio Ia definicion de Ia palabra "luz" en Ia
tela. Despues enrol lola tela, Ia llev6 a Ia galerfa y Ia lav6.
Estos son solo algunos ejemplos de artistas que desarro llaron accio nes de arte
neovanc' ':!rdista para producir crfticapolftica yartfstica en Chile duronte Ia dlicada
de los setenta yochenta. La crftica cultural Nelly Richard acun6 el termino"Ia escena
de Ia avanzada" para designar a los distintos grupos de artistas que usaban una
estetica experimental para asumir una postura que estaba simultaneamente en contra
de las instituciones de arte consagradas yde Ia dictadura 7 La avanzada no existfa
como un grupo particular o un movimiento concreto; el termino se referfa mas bien a
una gama de estrategias artfsticas y polfticas Distintos grupos de Ia avanzada se
enfrentaron al "enemigo" a sumanera. Francisco BrugnoliBera el director del Taller
de Artes Visuales en Bel lavista, donde se reunfan artistas experimentales para debatir
sus diversas aproximaciones Ronald Kay, Eugenio Dittborn, yCatalina Parra forma ron
uno de esos grupos; Nelly Richard, Carlos Leppe y Carlos Altamirano formaron otro;
el Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) confrecuencia se opuso aambos.
Richard distingue entre dos tendencias artisticas de Ia a anzada. Una era CADA: "en
Ia lfnea de las vanguardias, reivindicaba el proyecto estetico como vinculador de
fuerzas de cambia que pretenden transformar el con junto de las estructuras sociales."9
La otra tendencia, que Richard atribuye aLeppe, Dittborn, Altamirano, DfazyBrugnoli-
Errazuriz, cre6 "micronarrativas fragmentarias y dispersas" e intent6 "alterar y
subvertir Ia 16gica del sistema" siguiendo un paradigma desconstruccionista y
posmodernista Jo En terminos simples, las distintas tendencias dentro de Ia avanzada
corresponden adiversas aproximaciones al enfoque yaIa escala. Ya que Ia situaci6n
polftica habfa cerrado al pals, algunos artistas exploraban espacios privados o
marginales mientras queotros se involucra ban con Ia sociedadentera.
Eugenio Oittborn
A partir de 1976, el artista plastico Eugenio Dittborn comenz6 a incorporar
fotograffas halladas de "individuos desconocidos" en su obra, desafiando a los
espectadores a contemplar las identidades de historias de Otros anonimos y
olvidados. Durante los anos ochenta, produjo obras de video y acciones de arte.
Su video, La historia de Ia ffsica 11983), yuxtapuso imagenes contrastantes tales
como el nacimiento de su hija a una fi lmaci6n del artista vertiendo 120 litros de
lubricante en las arenas del Desierto de Tarapaca En 1985, Dittborn empezo a
crear col lages, pintura postal, que despues envi6 por correo ly conti nua haciendolo)
a museos y galerfas en todo el mundo. 11
Los collages de Dittborn con frecuencia enfatizan las dificultades del movimiento,
del viaje y de Ia distancia cultural Retornarl YVR, 1993), por ejemplo, presenta a
un indio llamado Jemnr; Button, que fuecomprado/robado par un baton en 1829
vllevado de Ia Tierra del Fuego a Londres. Despues de quince meses de rnpa
occidental, clases de ingles, "civilizaci6n" cristiana y lama, Button fue devuelto a
su hagar Ia bordo del mismo barco que Charles Darwin, el Beagle) Mas adelante,
se rehus6 regresar a Londres y supuestamente fue ellfder de una masacre de
misioneros cristianos en 1859 1 7 El usoque hizo Dittborn de Ia imagen de Jemmy
Button simboliza Ia complejidad de Ia (in)comprension cultura l La historia
atestigua Ia dificultad de reducir Ia distancia cultural, a pesar de largos viaJes
Las pinturas aeropostales de Dittborn sc exhiben allado del sabre en el rual han
sido enviados Las estampillas y matasellos enfatizanlas distancias- la distancia
quesepara ellugar de origen, Ia casa/estudio del artista yellugar distante donde
el arte es exhibido. La ubicacion geografica de Chile, un territorio al sur delimitado
por el mary los Andes, subraya aun mas Ia nocion de Ia distancia en Ia obra de
Dittborn La dictadura aisl6 politicamente aeste pafs ya marginado geograficamente
El proceso del correo aereo por tanto, ha involucrado una estrategia practica AI
enviar su tra bajo por este media a disti ntos destinos internacional es, Dittborn
evit6 Ia censura y Ia repres ion del Chile dictatorial
El proceso de enviar los co ll ages los afecta ffsica, estetica y metaforicamente
Dittborn dobla cada pintura postal para quequepa dentro del sabre. Los plicguesque
 quedan marcan Ia obra de forma significativa Si un cuadro tradicional se presenta
en un lienzo lisa que elimina toda senal de transporte, los dobleces en las pinturas
postales de Dittborn IIaman Ia atenci6n hacia Ia historia itinerante de las obras.
Existe una tension paradojica entre las lotos incorporadas en los collages y los
pliegues que las rodean. Las fotograflas danIa impresion de historia congelada-
temas que parecen res istentes al cambia. Las senas de dobleces anteriores, par
otro Iado, nos recuerdan que Ia historia y el tiempo no son estaticos
En abril de 1998, las pinturas aeropostales fueron enviadas aChile para una exposici6n
en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Exhibirlas en el pais de cierta manera completo
el ciclo. Como Jemmy Button, las pinturas habian regresado a "casa."
CAD A: Colectivo de Acciones de Arte l3
En 1979, Fernando Balcells, Juan Castillo, Diamela Eltit, Lotty Rosenfeld yRaul Zurita
fundaron el Colectivo Acciones de Arte, CADA. Su objetivo era intervenir en el espacio
cotidiano de Santiago con imagenes ins61itas que interrogaran las condiciones quese
habian vuelto habituales en el ambito represivo del Chile dictatorial. El grupo CADA
actuaba en el espacio donde el arte y Ia politica convergen -Ia esfera social-
subrayando al mismo tiempo Ia estetica de Ia politica y Ia politica de Ia estetica.
Concebia a Ia ciudad entera como un museo, aIa sociedad como un grupo de artistas
en colaboracion y a Ia vida como una obra de arte a ser corregida Las acciones del
CADA se referian aproblemas urgentes - Ia desnutricion, el golpe, los desaparecidos,
etc.- e intentaban destacar esos temas par mediade un lenguaje contestatario. Si
las vanguardias historicas aspiroban acambiar Ia realirlad atraves del arte, Ia ret6rica
neovanguardista de CADA aspiraba acorregir Ia vida como si Iuera una obra de arte.
Del happening CADA heredo Ia practica de usar Ia ciudad como un media artistico
abierto para Ia creacion de arte efimero colectivo. Pero en contraste a los happenings,
las acciones de arte de CADA intentaban canalizar Ia energia de Ia calle de manera
productiva para estimular cambios democraticos.
La primera acci6n de CADA:
Para no monf de hambre en el arte
Para no monr de harnb1e en e/ arte se Ilevu a cabo a Ia largo de varias etapas. El
3 de octubre de 1979 los miembros de CADA distribuyeron cien balsas de media
litro de leche a los residentes de La Gran;a, un barrio popular de Santiago Cuando
entregaronla leche, pidieron que las balsas vacias fueran de•;ueltas para pasarlas
a artistas que las usarian como material para oiJras a ser exhibidas en Ia Galeria
Centro Imagen Cada balsa llevaba impresa Ia fras.; "1/2 li t1o de lc:chc." '(a que
el gobierno de Ia Unidad Popular habia garantizado media litro de leche diario
para cada nino. Ia presencia de esta frase impresa aludia a Ia memoria del
gobierno de Allende. Las balsas de leche resucitaban Ia memoria del idealismo
socialista truncado.
El mismo dia, CADA publico una pagina en Ia revista Hct·, una revista de circulacion
nacionalmasiva. La idea era publicar una pagina completamente en blanco Pn Ia
revista, con solo las siglas del grupo en Ia parte inferior. El director de Ia revista,
cuyo nombre era ironicamente senor Blanco, les cedi61a pagina coni acondici6n de
que incluyeran algun contenido. El texto publicado aludia a Ia acci6n de Ia entrega
de leche, asi como a su intento fa llido de "imprirnir" una pcigina en blanco e11 Hov
imaginar esta pagina completamente blanca
imaginar esta pagina blanca como Ia leche diaria a consumir
imaginar cada rincon de Chile privado del consumo diario de lcche
como paginas blancas para llenar 11
.,
Este texto, altamente poetico, funcionaba par un proceso de contextualizaci6n.
Los niveles de metatoras y lecturas reiteraban Ia estructura de varios niveles de
Para no monr de hambre en el arte.
Colaboraciones internacionales
Para no morir de hambre en el arte tambien tuvo colaboraciones en Colombia y
Canada. En Bogota, Ia artista y poeta Cecilia Vicuna 15 adapto Ia imagen a Ia
situacion colombiana. Como Vicuna explica en Ia descripci6n de su accion titulada
Un vasa de /eche derramado bajo el azul del cielo, Ia "leche pura" escaseaba en
Bogota Alrededor de 1920 niiios marian cada a~o en Bogota como resultado de
haber ingerido leche adulterada con quimicos Aludiendo a este "crimen de
lecheria," Vicuna llen6 un vasa con colb6n, un pegamento lechoso. Amarro un
cordon rojo al vasa y a las 1230 de Ia tarde, tiro del cordon para asi derramar Ia
leche en el pavimento enfrente de Ia Quinta de Bolivar. En el pavimento, Vicuna
!labia escrito su poema Vasa de leche con tiza iG Mientras tanto, en Canada, el
artista Eugenio Tellez llevo aca boun performance en el cual se bebio un vasade
leche y leyo un discurso !rente al Ayuntamiento de To1ontu. Desgraciadamente, el
texto de Tell ez se ha perdido
1
La accion de CADA en Chile yuxtaponia Ia ca rencia de leche a Ia desapariciondel
gobierno de Al lende, en otras pa labras, a Ia promesa desaparecida tanto de Ia
leche como de Ia democracia. "iComo no vcr", escribi6 CADA desp ut ~ de Ia
accion, " en las balsas de leche I.. .Ino solo Ia denuncia de las carencias, de Ia materia
I
indispensable enaJenada al pueblo y alos nifios de Chi le, sino tambien un simbolo
del encierro, de lo restringido, de un ambiente reprimido? iC6mo no ver en csas
balsas, materia amordazada, restadas al ciclo vital de Ia vida, no ~6 ! u de Ia
denuncia sino tambien una pro testa I... )?" AI considerar Para no morir dehambre
en e/ arte en su conJunto, las tres instancias forman una cadena de acc i6n
internacional-tres extremos de Iaeconomia mundial. Canada, un pais del primer
mundo, se beneficiaba de un exceso de leche. En Colombia, los nifios marian par
causa de Ia corrupcion econ6mica, de leche envenenada. En Chile, las promesas
de leche y de salud publica habian desaparecido con el golpe.
]
]
Noes una aIdea
CADA politiz61 aacci6n a(lll mas con un discurso grabaclo con anteriorida·l, :;o es
una aldra, que prnnunciaron !rente a un edifir. io de la s Nacionr.s Ur,: 1 · en
Santiago, Ia CEPAL (Comisi6n Economica para Ameri ca LJtina y el C;. 1i''/. El J
maniiwsto, grabado en las cinco lengua~ uficiales de Ills Nacioncs Uni,;,, ·, :,i.JO,
ingles, franc es, ruso y e·panol). expresab, un rechazo, I monuloyi smo ' , ;:drtir
del titulo 'I !a pri mera !rase, "No es una aIdea r.l sitio desde donde habla:1..·:.. .. ", J
el texto comenzaba situandose mas como negaci6n quecomo un discurso uni IJCO.
Aunque Noes una aidea, dcnuncio Ia situaci6n Lie Chile, el texto aun C\Ui ~ , ba
esperonza. La ultima !rase dPsrribia el "recorrido" de sufrimi entoCOillO llf1 . ;.·Ao
por ganar" CADA visualizaba el proyecto de mejorar Ia realidad como un rro 1:cto
rreativo "Noes una aldea el sitio desde donde hablamns, noes soloeso, ;ino un j
Iugar donde el paisaje como Ia mente yIa vida son espacios acorregir" El proyr:cto
de mejorar el mundo correspondia al arte se corrige Ia rea lidad como uno corrige
un texto o como se moldea de nuevo una escultura.
CADA reiter6 su poetica politica-l a politica creativa es arte-a Ia largo de todas
sus acciones y manifiestos. Su obsesi6n con subrayar Ia conexi on entre el arte y
Ia vida muestra Ia influencia de los artistas alemanes Joseph Beuys y Wolf
Vosteii. 1B Sin embargo, en Iugar de buscar una influencia europea especiricap·ra
ubicar las ideas del grupo delJemos nolar que Ia fusion utopica clc artc y 1. lli<J \d
habia estado presente en el campo del arte latinoamericano par lo menns anmtir
 de los aiios sesenta El siguiente manifiesto, leido de manera colectiva par diez
artistas argentinas en Rosar1o en 1968 es sorprendentemente parec1do a un
manifiesto de CADA:
Creemosque el arte noes una actividad pacifica ni de decoracion de Ia vida
burgue ade nadie ... Aspiramos atransformar cada pedazo de Ia real idad
en un objeto artistico que se vuelva sabre Ia consciencia del mundo,
revelando las contradicciones intimas de esta sociedad declase.19
Lasegunda acci6n de CADA: Inversion de escena
El miercolr s 17 de octubre, 1979, CADA organiz6 un desfile de 10 camiones
lecheros q11e circularon por Santiago y se estacionaron !rente al Museo Nacional
de Bellas Artes La manera en que consiguieron los camiones demuestra Ia
picardiadn CADA: Segun Rosenfeld, para obtener los camiones, convencieron a
un gerente de Ia campania lechera Soprole de Ia belleza de Ia ima gen. Aunque
quiza confundi do p_or las explicaciones sabre el arte conte.mporaneo que dio CAD A,
el gerente imagmo una oportun1dad publiCIlana Despues del evento, algu1en le
habria dicl10 que lo habian engaiiado, haciendolo participar involuntariamente en
un 8 protcsta politica, pues Ia campania intent6 comprar el video de Ia acci6n.
cuandoCADA se rehus6 a venderlo, Soprole lleg6 al extrema del cambiar ellogo
de su flotn lie camionesl J
En 1979, el mero acto de presenciar alga en publico era peligroso Segun Zurita,
el desfile de cam iones lecheros dio Ia impresion inmediata de una invasion de
tanques r,: litares AI ll egar al museo con los cam iones de leche, los artistas
cubrieron Ia fachada del mismo con un gran lienzo blanco. Luego declararon que
el verda·Je ro museo estaba afuera en las ca lles. Para lograr eso, CADA
nuevamente recurrio a tacticas picaras. Segun Rosenfeld, sabian que Ia directora
del museo no estaba ahi porque se habia operado. Necesitaban usar el asta de Ia
bandera, ara subir ellienzo Un general habia muerto, asi que Ia bandera chilena
estaba a media asta. AI comenzar a bajar Ia bandera, los guardias del museo
confromaron a los artistas. Los miembros de CADA les explicaron que tenian
permisod<; Ia directora, que era una acci6n artistica en honor a los cien aiios de
I existenria delmuseo i Los guardias les permitieron seguir adelante I
Nelly Ri·.'~ord hu interprctado Ia intcNenciun dellicnzo como un actode tres elementos
Cu<;. ~J el grupo CAOA .. tacha el frontis del Museo .. bloquea virtualmente
Ia t. ,·rada, ejerce una doble censura a Ia institucionalidacl artistica
Ce.. . , '!ra su monumento, primero, como fvluseo (a lcgoria de Ia tradici6n
saualizadora del arte del pasado) y, segundo, como Museo chilena
(si:rb lo del oficialismo cultural de Ia dictadura) Pero Ia hace reclamando
a I~ \ez Ia calle como "el verclaclero Museo" en Ia que los trayectos
cohlinnos de los habitantes de Ia ciudad pasan a ser-por inversion de Ia
m: -da--la ll118Va obra de artG a contem~l a L:'
La acc;,_ .l presentaba una de las ideas centralesdel CADA Ia calle es un museo :
lnvers j11 de escena incitola refocalizaci6n de las miradas publicas Para entonces
Ia dictJoura llevaba mas de seis aiios en el poder y Ia situaci6n se habia vuelto
ha bit~a l, casi invisible Vista en su conjunto, Ia acci6n organizaba Ia rea lidad en
lo qu llamaba una "escultura social" una "acci6n de arte que intenta organizar,
mediante Ia intervenci6n, el tiempo y el espacio en el cual vivimos, como modo,
primero de hacerlo mas visible y luego, mas vivible ",. J Aunque CADA no menciona
Ia refrmncia, el termino "escultura social" fue acunaclo por el arti stil aleman
Joseph Beuys ' I CAOA le clio al termino un significado especifico, empleandolo
en el c·,ntexto de Ia dicta dura de Pinochet. Adema s, ta mbi en se aprovech6 de Ia
traduccion al espaiiol, "escultura social" para evocar su afirmaci6n de que Ia
cultura popular de las calles "es cultura." 1~
iAy, Sudamerica!
El12 de julio de 1981, CADA Ianzo 400,000 volantes sabre Santiago usando seis
avionetas. Para poder "leer" esta accion, existen par Ia menos tres niveles
diferentes que hay que tener en cuenta el texto del volante, el componente visual
y el performance discursivo de Ia acci6n.
En el nivel mas convencional, se puede leer el texto mismo de los volanteszs Las
ideas principales reiteraban los conceptos que CADA habia expresado en sus dos
primeras acciones. AI retirar el arte de su contexto tradicional y llevarlo a Ia calle,
CADA pretendia unir al "arte'' con Ia "vida." "NOSOTROS SOMOS ARTISTAS,"
insi sten dos veces en el volante, "PEROCADA HOMBRE QUE TRABAJA POR LA
AMPLIACION, AUNQUE SEA MENTAL, DE SUS ESPACIOS DEVIDA ES UN ARTISTA."
Aqui los miembros del CADA se autodescriben, al mismo tiempo que insistian que
el unico arte valido trabajaba directamente sabre Ia vida "ELTRABAJO DE
AMPLIACION DE LOS NIVELES HABITUALES DE LA VIDA ES EL UN ICO MONTAJE DE
ARTE VALI OO/LA UNICA EXPOSICION/LA UNICA OBRA DE ARTEQUE VIVE."
Una lectura de iAY Sudamerica! tambien implica un anal isis de las imagenes
visuales de Ia acci6n Seis avionetas que sobrevolaban Santiago en formaci6n
militar creaban una imagen inicial de una redada aerea militar que cambia una vez
empezaron a abrirse los paquetes de volantes. Miles de hojas en el cielo
competian par Ia atenci6n de los ciudadanos. iAY Sudamerica' convirti6 a los
aviones (y los volantes) en signos y al hacerlo escribi6 "poesia concreta" en el
cielo del Chile de Ia dictaduran
Nuevamente el contexto en el cua l la acci6n tuvo Iugar es de suma importancia.
En 1980, Ia lucha contra Ia dictadura en Chile habia comenzado con protestas
generalizadas que culminaron en 1983. Escritores yotras figuras publicas participaron
en estas acciones, primero tratando de encontrar fo rmas de expresi6n que no
motivaran Ia inmediata represi6n del ejercito A pesar de ser teoricamente mas
complejo, CADA fue uno de muchos grupos que colectivamente movilizaron el arte
y Iacultura para evitar ICJ censura y ayuclar a abrir un cspacio clemocratico.
Para esta extraordinaria acci6n, CADA obtuvo el permiso de las autoridacles para
criticar el autoritarismo · Ademas, esteticamente desarrollo un nuevo estilo cle
protesta. Aunque el artc panfletario era lo usado traclicionalmente par Ia izquiercla
ortocioxa, el grupo habia rechazado el discurso univoco. CADA. intervino en el
espacio politico y aereo de Ia dictadura combinanclo textos poeticos con imagenes
ins61itas, una fusion de Ia vida con el arte y Ia politica, que incitaba a los
ciudaclanos de Santiago a cuestionar Ia normalidad de Ia vida bajo Ia dictaclura.
No +I No mas
Quiza sin excepci6n, !os integraliPs riel grLq'n CADA con'iideran No +como lil acci6n
mas importante y trascendente del colectivo. Entre finales de 1983 y 1984, sus
miembros (y muchos colaboradores) salieron de noche en grupos para "rayar" las
paredes de Santiago con Ia oracion "No+". Poco despues, otros comenzaron acompletar
Ia !rase conimagenes opalabras. Declaraciones como "1o+dictadura", "No+ tortura",
"No+ armas", "No+ desaparecidos", "No+ muerte" empezaron afigurar en las paredes
de Santiago, formando asi una red de graffiti contrael regimen
No + fue una acci6n colectiva en el sentido mas amplio. No solamente
contribuyeron muchos artistas, sinoque el publico tam bien particip6. Para CADA,
parte del ex ito de esta obra fue el hecho de que su autoria desapareceria del toclo.
Desde su primera acci6n, habfan trabajado Ia idea del anonimato "firmando" Ia
pagina de Ia revista Hoy sola mente con el nombre del colectivo, desconocido
entonces. En No+ ni siquiera firma ron con el nombre, ni terminaron las frases La
noci6n de un colectivo especffico desapareci6 y Ia obra en sf lleg6 aser Ia consigna
comunal de Ia comunidad antidictatorial.
Otra vez Ia acci6n se difund i6 internacionalm ente. CADA envi6 un "llamado a
artistas" invitando a Ia participaci6n internacional. En Holanda, Juan Castillo
gestion6 una version europea de No+, que coincidi6 con Ia "toma" del Stedelijk
Museum, de Amsterdam.zg En Wash ington DC, Ia Galerfa Inti present6 No+ An
Action Performance Exhibit el11 de junio de 1984.Ju
A pesar del apoyo internacional, el impulso mas significativo vi no de Ch ile. A los
miembros de CADA les sorprendi6 ve r como Ia que empezo como su obra cobraba
vida propia dentro del movimiento democratico. La consigna "No +" encabezo
todas las marchas contra Ia dictadura. Milan lvel ic, Director del Museo Nacional
de Bellas Artes, comenta sabre Ia importancia de Ia accion "Cuando el grupo
CADA plantea el No+, y que esta referido a Ia situacion polftica concreta, el No
+Pinochet [.. ] esa accion ha tenido una prolongaci6n [.. ] en el No del Plebiscita
[sabre el gobierno de Pinochet], que permite entonces el restablecimiento, poco
tiempo despues, de las elecciones democraticas en el pa fs. 11 En 1990, Ia consigna
"No +" inclusive llego a aparecer en el tablero del Estadio Nacional en Ia
ceremonia publica con Ia que se inicia cl gobierno dcmocratico de Patricio Aylwin
El Colectivo Acciones de Arte se desintegro a lo largo de varios aiios y sus
miembros ahara siguen sus intereses individuales en el arte, Ia cultura y Ia
literatura." Hoy en dfa se oyen aun los ecos del CADA en Ia politica cultural de
Chile que tanto ayudaron a cambiar
Artistas que emigraron de Chile: Juan Downey y Alfredo Jaar
Juan Downey
Juan Downey se marcho de Chile en 1965, mucho antes de Ia dictadura que marco
Ia obra de muchos artistas chi Ienos contemporaneos. Hasta el golpe de 1973. gran
parte de su obra se enfocaba enla naturaleza y Ia filosofia del arte en si. de una
manera que mostraba su agudo sentido del humor. En una obra ejemplar, DOI' ney
mando a imprimir paquetes de fosforos semejante a los que se regalaban en esa
epoca como recuerclo de bodas, y presento los f6sforos en una pieza titulacla Una
escultura lie fuego I1969) En Ia cub ierta de otro paquete de f6sforos Downey
imprimiolo que podrfa considerarse su lema "EI arte de Ia energia invisible esta
enla energia lin)visible esta en." Para Downey, Ia vida correspondia auna energia
invisible. El arte, par otro Iado, representaba el proceso de volver visible Ia energia
Downey trabajaba con las tecnologfas emergentes de su epoca-el video, el
audio. Ia proyecci6n de luz. ill bioretroa limentaci6n ylas ondas de Ia ra io. ln·,cnto
maquinas electronicas para destacar las interre laciones entre el arte, Ia enerDia.
el pensamiento y Ia condic i6n humana Organizo happenings y performances,
frecuen temente recalcando el concepto de Ia "energia invisible" como Ia fuerza
vital que mueve nuestros cuerpos y nuestras mentesl i Para el Downey de los
happenings. el arte no era alga que pudiera compra rse y venderse, sino una
man era de vi vir Ia vida en elmomento actual yen un grupo social colectivo. ,,
La corta vida de Downey 11940-1993) incluyo una increfble variedad de experiencias
Pinto en Paris, organ iz6 happenings en los Estados Unidos durante los aiios 60, y
paso un aiio con su fami lia viviendo con varias tribus del Amazonas. incluyendo los
Yanomami lmeditando, dibujanclu filmando videos) entre 1976 - 77. Esto no quiere
decir que Downey no estuviera preocupado porIa situacion polftica de Chile. Luego
del golpe militar de 1973, cre6 videos e instalaciones que se enfrentaban a Ia
dictadura. Ya que vivfa en los Estados Unidos, Downey no tenia necesidad de
esconder su crftica usando complejos codigos, como hicieron los artistas que
permanecieron en Chi le. En esta linea, Downey cre6 camisetas con ellogo, "Chile
sf Junta no," y coloco una mancha poco suti l en el centro que simbolizaba Ia
sangre.J5 Las camisetas fueron entregadas a un grupo que protestaba frente a Ia
sede de Il l el11 de septiembrede 1974.
El performance en video de Downey, Bandera de Chile 11974) fue transmitido por
cable en el canal de television Dde Manhattan. ~G En 81 Downey parodiaba Ia
dictadura y el usa de Ia bandera nacional como discurso presentando una nueva
interpretacion de los colores simboli cos de Ia bandera
Esta es Ia bandera chilena. Ya que esta es una televisionen blanco ynegro,
debo explicaros el significado de sus co lares ..
AI explicar el significado de los colores en Ia television en blanco y negro, Downey
l
subraya Iaabsurd ade Ia manipulaci6n de simbolismos por parte decualquier nacion.
Segun el discurso oficial chi lena, el rojo deIa bandera representa Ia sangre de1ramada
en Ia lucha par Ia independencia, el azul representa ellfmpido cielochilena yel blanco
evoca Ia nieve de los Andes. Laversion de Downey trastoca este nacionalismo
El rojo representa Ia sangre de los heroes; el azul representa el agud, d
agua necesaria para lavar Ia sangre derramada; Ia estrella representa este
proceso interminable de sangrar y de lavar; el blanco, final mente, simboliza
Ia aniquilaci6n total de Ia sangre y del agua. La futura bandera chilenapodra
ser ocompletamente blanca, ocompletamente azul. ocompletamente raja.
No existe una narrativa de Ia victoria aquf, sino una de sufrimiento interminable.
Para Downey, Ia bandera tiene mas que ver con el conflicto que con Ia victoria;
tanto es asf, que los co lares estan en conflicto unos con otros.
Muchas de las instalaciones polfticas de Downey denunciaron a los medi s de
comunicacion par no comunicar Ia verdad de lo que ocurrfa en el Chile dictatorial.
En su instalacion Esquina 11985). Downey presento recortes de articulos
pinoch'!tistas del peric1dico chilena El A!crcurio y los contrasto con CL siJ, :ncs
criticas dol cl iario cuba no Granma En su·;ideo La fi.ladrcpatria I The 1\:, o ·t~ , .·J ,Jd,
1987) Dovme1 yuxtapuso imagenes de Ia televi 'i6n pinochetista con eL ,J de
protestas contrJ ia dictJclura. So/Jrejaulasl1987) c~ una CO!llpleja in: t" ';:t ' , de
p6Jaros en una Jaula conunmonitor de •ideo lmostranlo un video clc un "~> rn en
una Jaula) Josephine Watson escribe que el monitor en si representaUr'd ;·1:Ji3 y
que el "rneclio televisivo" viene a representar un "opresor mental." ·'
Alfredo Jaar J
Antes de partir
En 1981 el nrti sta Al frulo .Ioar colucri milbilnciPritas dr Chi I~ en una lineac;~t in ua
c;ue iba de 13> rn cnt3ii a~ al mar JJar IJs fotogriifi6 individual mente y cr. ;erie, J
presentandolas como una instalacion/performance El titulo era Chile 1981, Antes
de partir Fue el ultimo performance antes de que emigrara a Nue a York. por lo
que es su despedida personal de Chile Otras lecturas de Ia obra emergen cuando
vemos las banderas desde distintas perspectivas hist6ricas el momenta del
performance original en Chile, una vision de Ia trayectoria artfstica de Jaar y,
finalmente, desde el punta de vista de Ia polftica actual
J
Antes de partir se basa en Ia historia y el contexto politico de Chile. Durante los
primeros a11os setenta, Chile se encontraba enconflictoentre quienes apoyaiJanal
electo gobierno socialista, de Unidad Popular, yquicnes seoponfan vchemrn'ernonte
J
 aIa izquierda Luego del golpe de/11 de septiembre de 1973, se intensificola division
polltica entre Ia dictadura militar, sus partidarios y sus vlctimas.>sDentro de este
contexto, Antes de partirse convirtio en un slmbolo visual de Ia dualidad polltica de
Chile por media de una linea de banderas que divide el territorio. El titulo tambien
aludla aesta division "Partir" puede significar "irse" pero tambien "dividir" y"separar"
El pe~ormance de Jaar consti~uye una frontera que. representa de man era .lineal el
estado dividido de Chile atraves del profunda S1mbol1smo de Ia bandera nac1onal.
La secuvncia de fotograflas transmite par lome nos dos movimientos significativos
un movimiento horizontal que marcha hacia el oceano y un movimiento vertical de
Ia ma rea que sube y final mente consume y cubre las banderas. El contexto de Ia
dictaduramilitar contribuye con otros niveles de significado en estos movimientos.
El movimiento hacia el mar no solo se refiere a Iapartida personal del artista que
se fue de Chile, sino tambien a Ia multitud de chi/enos que cruzaron el mar huyendo
del pals hacia el exilio Asl como las banderas se hunden en el agua, Ia obra
] sugiere metaforicamente que Ia nacion se hundla bajo Ia represion autoritaria. El
pe~ormance hace alga mas que jugar con slmbolos nacionales, losantropomorfiza
Noes 1·osible ver estas banderas desaparec1endo bajo el agua s1n pensar en los
I desa a10cidos que fueron ejecutados por el regimen militar y cuyos cadaveres
fueron eliminados de manera clandestina (algunos de elias arrojados vivos al mar)
El per formance de Jaar dialoga con Ia nocion de "huella" en Derrida en relacion
J alosrJstros de los desaparecidos
Durant·Jcl gobierno de Pinochet, Ia dictaclura uso Ia bandera nacional para clividir
aChi!r! en dos bandos opuestos, los "chi/enos" vs. los "terroristas." La represion y
Ia manipulacion de los slmbolos nacionales iban de Ia mana. De hecho, Ia
manipul cion de los slmbolos suele preceder a Ia imposici6n de un poder abusivo.
En un pasaje sabre Ia "crueldad," Gilles De leuze y Felix Guattari escriben que "los
primeros signos son los signos territoriales que colocan sus band eras en cuerpos".<"
Mientras Ia dictadura imponra Ia bandera como slmbolo nacional, el performance
de Jaar denuncia Ia compleja red de Ia "bandera como discurso." En Chile 1981,
Antes de partir, Ia bandera ya no es un slmbolo monol6gico de Ia naci6n (una
relaci:•llineal que implica un vinculo directo entre significado y significante), sino
un t :.j J social rasgado, que incluye al artista que ya no pertenece mas a una
com u :~:~!acl unicla. La cli ctaclura plantola "bandera como simbolo" para representar
su vr ,';6n de Ia identidad chilena. El performance de Jaar divide simb61icamente
el sin ";/o(Ia par1e, para utiliLar nuevamente cl verba partir) yasi Ia separa vdivide
I al sir· J !also de Ia unidad nacional en una multiplicidad cle hila$empapados.
Jaar 1. :vamente cmple6 el simbo!o de I bander1, Ia bandera de los Ec;tados
Unid,··.,en su intervenci6n mas conocida, Un logopara America (1987) AI iluminar
Ia fra~· .o Esta no es Ia bandera de America" sabre una imagen de Ia bandera de
los U 1dos Unidos en un enorme anuncio luminosu en Times Square en Nueva
J York, , 1ar s1rnultaneamcnte subra 6/a hegemonIa politica de los Estados Unidos
yel c : wpto gramsciano de Ia hc~emonia que permite que mil/ones de personas
iden: :iquen de manera inocente un solo pals y su bandera par el nombre
cont. ·- 1tal, "AmericJ " Los Estauos Unidos fueron camp/ices del golpe de/11 cle
sept<- . ~. iJre de 1973, : el acontecimiento que inspir6la linea de banderas chilenas
de J, -. Mas adelante, el 11 cle septiembre de 2001 promovi6 una asombrosa
prolif 'acion cle banderas "americanas" por todo el territorio de los Estados Unidos
Est2,, ''scsion con Ia bandera nort8americana persiste hasta el eli ade hoy.'1
Opus 1981, Andante desesperato
La obn Opus 1981, Andante desesperatode Jaar se inspir6 en una fotografia tomacla
en ':. ilragua CIJ/979pur Ia futografaSusan Meisel as. l:stainsulita fotografiacopta
ado~ soldados sandinistas con ametralladoras resguardandose bajo una barricada de
saco~ de arena. Oetras de estos hombres, vemos a otro sandinista tocando el
clarinete. La fotografla inspiro a Jaar a filmarse a sr mismo en un video tocando un
clarinete yaincluir este video en Ia instalacion del museo. Esta instalacion, ganadora
de un premia, fue presentada en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes en Santiago de
Chile en 1981. La exposicion presentaba un televisor que mostraba el video de Jaar
soplando en el clarinete, el video original manta do en Ia pared yIa fotografla de Susan
Meiselas. Habra tambien sacos de arena y grandes representaciones de notas
musicales hechas de metal dispersas por toda Ia instalacion.
Para interpretar el performance de Jaar, es uti/ primero contemplar Ia foto de
Meiselas. iCual es Ia historia detras de esta insolita foto tomada en Ia epoca
cercana al triunfo de Ia revoluci6n sandin ista en julio de 19797 La fuerza poetica
de esta fotografla reside en su enigmatica y casi surreal yuxtaposicion de
imagenes aparentemente incongruentes El contexto es Ia guerra los sandinistas
(con quienes podemos suponer que Jaar simpatizaba en Ia epoca) estan agachados
atras de una barricada. Parece que han estado recibiendo disparos y podemos ver
agujeros de balas y municiones en las paredes cercanas. En media de esta
escaramuza, un so/dado esta de pie, desafiante, y toea el clarinete. No podemos
orr Ia musica que toea, solo podemos imaginarnosla iUn canto de guerra
sandinista para animar a las tropas7 iUna obra clasica para calmar el caos7
iMC1sica circense para burlarse de los enemigos7 La foto de Meiselas presenta una
interrogante musical abierta
AI analizar el usa que hace Jaar de Ia imagen, Ia melodla musical concreta llega
a ser irrelevante. El so/dado que toea el clarinete es una representaci6n, un
slmbolo visual, un leona. Si leemos Ia fotografla atraves del filtro de Ia instalaci6n
de Jaar, el so/dado con un clarinete puede representar el "arte" levantandose y
siendo escuchado en el ambito de Ia guerra y Ia politica Esta lectura parece me nos
inadmisible cuando recordamos que el termino "vanguardia" se deriva del
vocabulario de Ia guerra En Ia guerra, Ia vanguardia muestra el camino, Ia
vanguardia explora el !rente y/o inicia los ataques al enemigo. Par supuesto que
las vanguardias hist6ricas se refieren a una serie de movimientos artrsticos que
empleaban tecnicas experimentales entre las dos Guerras Mundiales, hacienda
diversos esfuerzos para realinear nuestras expectativas esteticas para provocar
cambios en nuestros conceptos del arte yde Ia vida Mas adelante, los artistas de
Ia neovanguardia han empleado metodos que recuerdan a las vanguardias
hist6ricas en di tintos conte>·tos, de.;de los a11os 60 hasta el presente, en varios
intcntos de emplear el arte como arma poHtica Durante losanos ochcnta, grupos
cle arti stas de Ia neovanguardia debatian acaloradamcnte sabreel tema de LOillO
usar el artc cxperim t)ntal como armc1 pu liti c c~ p3ru opone1se al autoritarismo El
joven AlfredoJaar ciertamente habria estado al tanto de esos debates dentro del
candente mundo del arte de Ia avanzada chilena.
El Opus de Jaar recontextualizJ Ia fotografia de ~~Ieise las y asr crea una alegorla
del poder del arte pam desafiar Ia inJusticia Para e' te performance, Jaar se film6
a sl mismo. su cabeza y su torso, "tocando" el clarinete. Pongo Ia palabra tocando
entre comillas porque Jaar no sabra tocar ese instrumento. En el video, el soplo
fuertemente en Ia boquilla (que de hecho esta al rev,,s), p1oducicndo sonidos
disonantescomo chilliclos musicales ha sta que final mente se desmaya del esfuerzo
yclesaparece de Ia imagen El gesto del performance aqui noes una exploraci6n de
Ia naturaleza de Ia musica. Jaar no toc6 una melodia (ni siquiera una melodia de
vanguardia), sino quP. cre6 un opus experimental par media del cual expresaba Ia
desesperaci6n sofocante de quienes vivian en el Chile dictatorial
Tal vez Ia clave de Opus 1981 sea Ia relacion entre Ia foto de Meisselas y el
performance mismo. Jaar hizo un performance de lo que vela en Ia foto, una
alugo1 fa del podcr del artc. Aunque Jam sali6 de Chile esc mismo ano, 1981, ha
seguido utilizando in stalaciones e intervenciones pC1bli cas provocadoras para
enfrentar sea Ia politica y Ia injusticia en todo elmunclo A lo largo de su carrera,
 Jaar ha continuado criticando las injusticias-la dictadura, Ia pobreza, el
fen6meno de los "sin techo," el SIDA, Ia frontera Mexico-Estados Unidos, los
medias masivos de comunicaci6n y el genocidio, par mencionar algunas-y ha
articulado estas crfticas a traves dellenguaje del arte experimental Opus 1981,
Andante desesperato, puede ser vista como un performance que marco un hito en
Ia formaci6n de Jaar como artista/activista. Como el sandinista con su clarinete,
Jaar se presenta con gesto de desaflo y crea performances y arte para denunciar
y oponerse a Ia injusticia.
Arte :;t Vida: Acciones de artistas chi/enos contemporaneos
Alfredo Jaar coloca como prefacio a su libra, The Fire this Time. Public
Interventions 1979-2005, una cita de James Baldwin "La vida es mas importante
que el arte, eso es lo que hace al arte importante " Para Jaar, el arte es el
mecanismo atraves del cual derivamos senti do de Ia vida ycriticamos Ia injusticia
polftica Una perspectiva similar une a los artistas chilenos de Ia avanzada, las
pinturas postales de Eugenio Dittborn, las acciones de arte del CADA y las
instalaciones y videos del fallecido Juan Downey
El arte no es Ia vida- arte 7: vida-y sin embargo el arte y Ia vida estan unidos
de manera inseparable en las acciones de arte chilenas. Para Downey, el arte hac fa
visible Ia energfa invisible de Ia vida Para CAOA, "el arte es Ia vida corregida,"Hy
sus acciones de arte aspiraban a mejorar Ia vida, transformandola en esculturas
sociales visibles y vivibles Para Oittborn, el arte revela los pliegues y arrugas que
Ia sociedad represiva, Ia historia y el poder tratan de alisar y esconder. El arte no
es Ia vida, pero representa, a traves de su acci6n, el potencial de entender,
denunciar y corregir las desigualdades y Ia injusticia El arte nos proporciona los
medias para realizar y mejorar las condiciones y realidades politicas de Ia vida.
Ver el ensayo de Nelly Richard. "The Rhetoric of the Body," Margins and Institutions, en
el cual analiza el usa del cuerpo en Leppe, Eltit y Raul Zurita Ver tam bien ellibro par Nelly
Richard. concebido en colaboraci 6n con Carlos Lcppe, Cuerpo Com;ccional (Santiago
VISUAL 1980)
2 Robert Neustadt, Cada dfa La creaci6n de un arte sociai(Santiago Editorial Cuarto Propio.
20011. 21. La sewon de Colectivo Awones de J.\rtc (CJ.\DA) fue extraida de mi I11Jro CA DA
dii:l, y traducida al ingles por Odile Cisneros.
3 Ver el capitulo. "Ln tr,m sgresion de los hmites" . Gaspar Galaz·,· ~:1 i l a n lvelic. Cllilc..1rtc
xtual (Valparais0 Erlicioncs Univnrsitaria< de Valpiirais0. Unil'ersulad Catr1 lic, de
Va l pa rJ i~o . 1992) para una historia riel arte chilena dr. este perioclo
Rosenfeld conti ~; ~a de ~a rr ol l a n d o e ~ te trahilJO co11 vc1 riaci ones en d1stintas partes de l
n11111do. En 1982 cunvirt1 6 las s ehJ I £> ~; de t! .in51l" en nuces en una cd lle t il fr ~ nte de Iii Clsil
Blilnca de lo' Estaclos Unido,. Esc mismo ano. instalil mon1tores ric 1ideo que pres~ n ta ba n
su trabaJO en Ia Balsa de Valores de Chile. Recientemcnte. Rosenfeld real izo de nuevo
esta intervenci6n enla expos1cion Docum~nta !Zen Kassel. Alemama. en 2007. PJrJ una
discusion de t sta obru (escrita por miemJros i colaboradores de CAD ). •oer Unat.'J.·IIa de
cruces solHeel pavunentocle L. Rosenfeld con textosde D. Eltit \ Eugenia Brito !Santiago
Ecl ic1ones CA DA , 1980) y Desarato, SoLlfc' Ia oiJra de Lotty Ros.;nfiJid, con textos de E.
Brito, D. Eltit. G. ~. IUI1 oz , 1~ . Richard '/ R. Zurita (Santiago Franciscn Legers Edi tc1. 1986)
'/cr tJmbicn Gala, e l1elic, Cl:i'c', Jrtc JC!Ilal, 229 - 231.
Gala1e lvelic. Ibid. 21 5-216.
6 Para un anal isis del performance de Eltit. ver Robert Neustadt, (Con)Fusing Signs and
Po</!radern Positions. Span;sh !1mPriran Performance. Experimental Writing w1rl the
Critique of Political Cunfuswn. (New York Garland Publishing. 1999)25- 62 . Ver tambien
el articulo de Laura Garcia-Moreno. "Violent (Re-I Inscriptions: Writing and Perfonmnce
in Diamela Eltit's Lumperica" Latin American Literary Review 35.6912007). 120 - 136.
Z80
Ver Ia introduccion allibro de Nelly Richard. Margins and Institutions. 119-123. Para una
muestra de las publicaciones con anal isis y entrevistas en Ia red, ver "Recomposici6n de
escena. 1975-1981. 8 publicaciones de los artes visuales en Chile" de Paula Honorato
and Luis Munoz <http//www.textosdearte.ci/recomposicion/index htmi>
8 F Brugnoli ya era considerado artista importante en Chile a partir de 1965, cuando cre6una
serie de "monos pegoteados," pinturas/collages que siempre incluian un par de monos u
overoles como elemento principal. Despues del golpe, Brugnoli fue despedido de su puesto
como profesor de arte en Ia Universidad de Chile. Durante Ia transicion democratica
Brugnoli volvio a Ia Universidad para convertirse en vicedecano de Ia Facul tad de Artes:
Desde 1998. Brugnoli ha sido director del Museo de Arte Contemporaneo en Santiago
Nelly Richard. La lnsubordinaci6n de los signos Cambia politico. transforrnaciones
cu/turales ypoeticas de Ia crisis (Santiago Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1994), 47
10 Ibid, 46-47.
11 Sabre Ia obra de Dittborn. ver Galaz e lvelic; Richard, Mmgins and Institutions, y Ernesto
Saul, Artes Visuales 20 afios 1970- 1990 (Santiago Ministerio de Educacion, 1991) Ver
tambien Dan Cameron. "Eugenio Dittborn: Return to Sender- Visual Artist, "Art Forum
lnternacional. Vol. 31 (marzo, 1993) 1
12 Obtuve esta informacion arespecto de Ia vida de Jemmy Button de Wikipedia. una fuente
quiza no muy confiable. Par supuesto, todo lo que nos queda de Button son irnagcnes,
tanto visuales como testimonios narrativos. construidos por los ingleses que lie· arona
cabo el experimento de "civilizarlo." seguidos de las reapropiacion posterior de estas
I
imagenes par parte de una serie de escritores. entre elias, Dittborn.
13 Para una descripci6n yaniilisis rnascompleto de las acciones deCADA (incluyenduu,tl,_. stas
con urtistas. fotografos y documenlos histoncos). favor de ver Neustadt, CADA dia.
14 Ibid, 137.
15 Cecilia Vicuna lla experimentado con arte y politica no tradicional desde losanos sesenta
en Chile. En 1967. Vicuna fund6 "Tribu No," un grupo que disemino manifiestos e hizo
mtervenciones pC1blicas En1971. exllibio suobra'1nstalacion Ototloen el Museo de Bellas
Artes de Santiago Para esta p1eza(de gran imp01tanc1a h1storica en el arte chilena). Vicuna
lleno el salon principal con un metro de hoJas secas. Ha trabaJado con pintura y ha hecho
peliculas. pero es mas conocida par sus poemas visuales, "precarios". que construye con
basuras. ramas, hilos. lanas y otros objetos encontrados. Despues del golpe, V1cuna se
exilio en Londres(1973) y clespu es Bogota 11977) En Londres funclo un grupo cle activistas
artisticas que trabajaban por Ia democracia. En Colombia construy6 escenario:. para el
Teatro Candelaria ',' el grupo musical OuilapayCI!l Desde 1980. Vicuna reside en N eva
'lark. Es rlli!Orii de VJIOOS li bra ~ de roecia Tilmbit:n ha e\hibido sus instalacirnP ; Lll el
~·1u ,. c um of f~l uc! e rn ,\It 'i cl ~J e :, Uu>bd ll C'l fJue\il Yor,. E, 17 de n o1 ie m i · ~ e r1·_ 2, ·06,
V i cu ilali :~ 1 t..! f~ r; r fn r rn;v-· ct ~ ~1 u:1a arr· ir1r1 ~ ! e a rt~ rrr nt ~; a1Pr1lari'J P rr ~id e 1 . : r1 ~ La
!AonL t l eil C1ui, Tcmil•ien I:Jr ', tr(, s c~ CL'IiiOvPr!.icll i:1sta!ar io11 Ouwu ;:;et \ It .;· ._-: r. l
r.cnt rn r uli ll!rll P,d;molil l··,ll11 11' il t.; II: SL ubica lirh j!i ,!~:1 Pahcio Presidf'i l':i j i l
~G Para L.na dcscrip,:ionma•. rleta llada rlt: Ia acc1un /Jn 1asu tie !echd dtJtramarlo ! ,;. :t/
del ciciu. ·, ,;; po e m r~ de: '/icL!Ild, 1u 1~1\l stadt . GADA dta. 29-30. Ver tJrniJien rn I' ' r; 1 '3,
Iadcscripcion escrita par V1 cuna. 18I. Um foio a C'Jiores de Ia accion o pa i ,JCI~ eP'" r '. r .da
cle Griselda Pollock. eel Generations and G:'agrapllies in tile Visual i'lrrs. Feminist Rc.' nciS,
!New York: Routl edge. 1996) Tamhit!nver fotos en blanco ynegro en ellibro CecJ . '· '- '1a,
The Ptucarious 0Uipt1t! Tile tlt1 and Poettv of CeCti a Vicu no.l•1 Catherine d~ ,\ ·1 :, . PJ,
Esther ,\ lien. tr1ns.II\PrtriJl, Bel[lium Weslcyiln ill'd Kanaal Art Foundation. 19g7)
17 Ncustilrlt. ( tWA d1a, 128.
18 Wolf Vo~tell1no> tr6 su ohra en Chi ie en Gale: i<, Epoca en 1977. dos aii os :,i ·', ;· !a
primera accion deC1\DA. En1981. D. Eltit 1L. Rosenfeld iaJaron por toda Europa tinvit"·ias
porIa lnteromeri can Foundation\ con el apoyo rle Ia Ford Foundation) Durante r•sk v:aje,
pasa ron rlos elias en lil casa de Vostell. IJablando. entre otras cnsas. de las primeras
acciones del CADA
19 Ana Longoni y Mariano Mestman. "Vanguarclia y re•, olucion Acciones \' definicior -s por
una 'Nueva Estetica' Argentina. 1968." La abolici6n del arte. Alberto Dallal, ed. (!Jlexico
Universidad Nacional 1\uton~ma de Me>,ico, 1998). 603
70 Neustnrlt. CADA r/i,;, 50.
 21 Ne!ly Richard, La insubordinaci6n de los signos, 41.
22 Hay par lo menos un precedente de una obra que intervino Ia fachada del Museo de Bellas
Artes. Ia instalaci6n Cuerpos blandos de Juan Pablo Langlois !Vicuna) en 1969. Langlois
llen6 balsas de plastico con peri6dicos, construyendo una manga de 200 metros que
recorria el Museo, salla par una ventana y se amarraba a un arbol enfrente del edificio.
Afios despues. en 1997, Gonzalo Diaz intervino Ia fachada con un an uncia de neon que
decia. "Unidos en Ia gloria y Ia muerte." Para una descripci6n de las obras de Langlois y
Oiaz en comparaci6n con Ia acci6n del CAOA, ver Neustadt, CADA dia, 18 y 32.
23 Neustadt, CADA dia, 24.
24 "How We Mold and Shape the World in Which We Live," Caroline Tisdal l, Joseph Beuys
!London Thames and Hudson, 1976), 6.
25 Una exposici6n reciente de arte mexicano contemporaneo en el Museum of Contemporary
Art de Chicago usa el concepto de Beuys como fundamento conceptual. Ver el ensayo
Julie Rodrigues Widhalm, "Reshaping the World Through Social Sculpture", Escultura
Social A New Generation of Art From Mexico City !Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art
con Yale University Press, 2007), 14-29.
26 Ver el volante de "jAy Sudamerica I" Icon texto completo) en Neustadt, CADA dia, 150.
27 "i AI Sudamerica I" tuvo Iugar dos aiios antes de que Zurita escribiera su poem aen el cielo
I de Jueva York. Estos dos gestos estan relacionados aunque son diferentes. Zurita escribio
versos en el cielo de Nueva York con el humo de aviones de propaganda.
28 Ver lascartas de CADA solicitando permiso asi como los correspondientesdocumentos de
lasautoridades militares en Neustadt, CADA dia, 146-49. ·
29 Vt" Ia descripci6n de Juan Castillo de este evento en Neustadt, CADA clfa. 60 - 61.
30 Lc<participantes en No r en Washington DC incluyeron !entre otros) Ari el Dorfman,
M1rcelo Montecino. Ri ck Reinhard, Luella Salvatierra, Naul Ojeda, Leslie Kuter, Eduardo
Ra;11irez. Jorge L. Somarriba, Horacia Quintanilla, Gabriela Frings, Helga Thompson, Yusof
Ghani. Nancy Garuba. Jim Spillane, Maria Riquelme. Aida Rurela, Oliva Cadaval, Gabrielle
Ecgcomb. Carlos Airen, y Enrique Aviles.
31 Neustadt, CADA dia, 175. Entrevista videografica con Lotty Rosenfeld
32 O;vmela Eltit es consideril da par muchos como una de las novelistas conternporaneas
mas sobresalientes en America Latina. Raul Zurita recibio el Premia Nacional de Literatura
r su poesia en el ana 2000. Juan Castillo \' Lotty Rosenfeld continuan trabaJando con
vdB'I, instalaciones y dcciones de arte. Fernando Ba lcells publica Ide vez en cuando)
sc.l re arte y cultura.
33 r JP1lplo, L.: t''/ergi .J lm•is Ne r!.cta un Ctl{lt'itJ! f(l de da/1/ d (1959 v1970)
34 PJ , d8;u ipc;ones y fotografiJs dt :os hap:,wing\ performances. insl,Jiac;onPs . .l:bUJO . .
y•. · cOS cle Do;·me·,. consultar el l'e llanwnle ilustrado catcilogu· libro. Josephine Watsc.n.
·; JO!\'f'L',' LO'I r.'"t'.!P m,i.; .J'Iij de r s!JS fl';i'~S( Va l o ncia IIJM.I, 19cSI
35 /l • :e·· clc oso. en 1969. D o ~mP. ·; l:ab'il crPado ntril serie de c,:nJi\etcJ' con rl loqotipl'.
'~ ;;c:ottGrapes' IBoicot;;r las lliasi y el sirnbolr del sindrcato. United Farm Workers.
lJ ~ · r.qui6
las carnisetas il jovenes que trabilJdban empacando comestibles para clientes
8·1'0' supermercados. quienes debianl!evar las camisetas y llegarse acarnar balsas con
u, ,,, Downey taml,i8n velldlo cam:seto' coil ese logo (firmadils y numeradas) 'i dPn6 los
f •:los rera udados d Crsar Chave:. lider del Sllldicato.
36 Con Ia participaci6n de Marilys Belt de Downey, Titi Oa Great, Juanfi Lamadrid, Rolando Pefia.
isabel Morrison, MaruJa Da Acosta-G6mez, Alexis del Lago, Steve Smithy Michael Krugman.
37 Juan Downev. 228
38 Esta polarizaci6n continua hasta cierto punta hoy en dia, aunque Ia consciencia de los
excesos violentos de Ia dictadura, aunado a revelaciones sabre Ia corrupci6n fiscal de Ia
familia Pinochet lei escandalo del Riggs Bank), han disminuido el apoyo abierto allegado
de Ia dicta dura de Pinochet. Estos cambios estan lorzando Ia construcci6n de una version
distinta de Ia derecha politica en Chile.
39 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane !Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press,
1992), 145.
40 Un logo para America incluye una serie de imagenes relacionadas. Antes de Ia imagen de
Ia bandera norteamericana, apareci6 el mapa de los Estados Unidos en elluminoso con Ia
frase "Esta noes America." Esta apropiaci61lling0istica-llamar "America" a los Estados
Unidos-va de Ia mana con Ia ideologia de que un pais puede y debe controlar las
decisiones politicas y econ6micas de todo un continente. Muchas personas nunca
cuestionarian, sin embargo, que los Estados Unidos es, de hecho, "America." Para usar el
vocabulario de Gramsci. Ia idea de que los Estados Unidos es America ha ganado Ia
hegemonia yes aceptada como si se tratara de "sentido comun." Jaar esta claramente
familiarizado con Ia obra de Gramsci; de hecho, ha creado varias obras recientes que se
basan explicitamente en Gramsci. Ver las lotos ycomentarios de las instalaciones Buscando
a Gramscil2004i y Celda infinital2004i en ellibro Jaar. SCL ZDD61Barcelona Actar. 2006)
41 La desclasificaci6n de documentos de Ia CIA durante Ia presidencia de Bill Clinton disip6
cualquier duda sabre Ia profunda complicidad del gobierno norteamericano en el golpe
contra Allende. Para una explicaci6n detallada sabre el papel de los Estados Unidos en
desestabilizar el gobierno cleAllende y el apoyo al golpe lincluyendo muchos documentos
desclasif1cados), ver ellibro de Peter Kornbluh . The Pinochet File. A Declassified Dossier
on Atroc1ty and AccountabilityiNew York New Press, 2003)
42 En Arizona-el estado numero 49 en relaci6n al presupuesto par alumna para Ia educacion
publrca primaria- una ley dicta que una "bandera americana" Ide no menos de dos pies
par tres pies y hecha en "America") sea colocada en cada salon de clase en todas las
escuelas publicas a nivel primaria, secundaria y de enseiianza superior. Aunque esto
comenz6 con el 11 de septiernbre, esta nueva ala de desplegar banderas esta ganando
impetu par el fenomeno conocido en Ia prensa como inmigraci6n ilegal Despues de Ia
"Guerra contra el terrorismo" (y Ia guerra a muchos otros niveles), Ia inmigracion de
personas ilegale' al "territorio americana" es citada coil frecuencia como uno de los
problemas mas graves de los Estados Unidos. Par supuesto que se trata de una cu e,ti6n
globdl Los nic ragliellses indigentes buscall trabaJOen Costa Ri ca, los habitantes del
Norte deAfrica lo hacenen bpana 1Francia,·, los turcrsenAlema·1ia. para dar solo unP
ejernpl os. En cada pais desarrollado. el supuP:. to peso ;ocio conomico de Ia inmigrJcion
Ileva a algunns a describir Ia inrniuracilin corno una arnen<Jla a Ia identirJad nacionill. En
CliiiP tambien, inmigrantes bolivianos \' peruanas supuestamenle ponen en rie sgo IJ
iden liclad nacional chilena
43 Neustadt. C4DA dia, 119.
 Una pe lea cubana contra los demonios (del olvido)
Elvis Fuentes
En 1986, en el contexto de una exposici6n sabre el tema de Ia(des)informaci6n en
el arte, 1 Tania Bruguera rehizo Huel/a de sangre (Blood Sign, 1974). uno de los
performances iniciales de Ana Mendieta. Se trataba, segun coment6 Bruguera en
una entrevista, de un intento par traerla de regreso a Cuba, es decir, recuperarla
para Ia memoria del arte cubano despues de su tragica muerte el ana anterior.
Mas tarde, utilizando como referencia Ia documentaci6n del catalogo de su
retrospectiva en el New Museum of Contemporary Art de Nueva York, Bruguera
rehizo numerosas obras, las cuales finalmente destruy6.2
Este gesto simb61ico respondfa a un problema fundamenta l que permanece
irresuelto: Ia vision incompleta que ofrece el discurso oficial sabre el arte cubano
Aun en el caso de Ana Mendieta, quien visit6 Cuba en mas de una ocasi6n, reali z6
abras en Ia Isla, expuso en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana yfue
un catalizador importante para los artistas de Ia generaci6n de 1980, Ia
historiograffa no reconoce ellugar que corresponde a su obradentro de Ia tradici6n
del arte en Ia lsla J La situaci6n es aun pear con respecto a los artistas que no
han visitado Cuba, independientemente de su posicion polftica con respecto a Ia
dictadura de Fidel Castro. 4 Simplemente se les ignora
Esta formulaci6n insular del arte cubano ha sido "clonada" acrfticamente par
numerosos estudiosos del tema en el sector academico norteamericano yeuropeo.
Deese modo, han dictado sentencia contra todo artista que haya "desertado" de
La Habana.5Es probable que dichos estudiosos justifiquen su enfoque en terminos
de territorialidad o contexto hist6rico (por ejemplo, enfocandose en los artistas
nacidos y formados bajo las nuevas condiciones impuestas por el socialismo real).
pero con ella estarian porIa menos mostrando una vision reaccionaria con respecto
a Ia identidad, Ia cultura y el arte mismo. En Iugar de apro echar su posicion de
privi legio yservir de canal para el dialogo entre el adentro y el afuera, han ejercido
un tratamiento disparejo, que puede ilustrarse con un par de comparaciones.
KMAN es un artista de Miami que ha desarrollado una obra esencialmente
performatica, tratando temas como el terror y Ia paranoia social desde mediados
de Ia decada de 1970 En una epoca marcada par las historias de secuestro de
aviones y del terrorismo militante islamico y marxista, KMAN adopt61a costumbre
de aparecerse en lugares publicos disfrazado con mascaras y aditamentos de tipo
belico que el mismo creaba. En mas cle una ocasi6n apertrech6 su bicicleta .
Montado en ella o a pie, KMAN realizaba "incursiones" en el espacio aP.reo,
terrcstrc o maritima. lnvaclia el espacio privado cle otros artistJs con avioncs o
cohetcs que terminaban bombardeando unlugar oestrellanclose contra un muro
Su presencia IIego a hacerse com(m en las aperturas de exposiciones y eventos
cornu una especie de asa lta al f'vi~:lro de Miami(Miami Metro Rail, 1985), realizado
par el grupo NADA. Las tacticas pod ian comprender Ia infil traci6n, como en una
acci6n ejecutada en unpopular centro nocturno, Fire and Ice (1984). para Ia cual
KMAN se hizo pasar par OJ Una vez dentro de Ia cabina, descarg6 sabre Ia
concurrencia cientos de bombas impresas en papel Las acciones de KMAN no
estu1icro:1e ~e nta s decontra• crsius. El hccho misrno de apar€ccrsedisfrazadu en
evcntos pLrblicos como desfiles, fuera de Ia epoca de Halloween y sin haberse
identificado adecuadarnente, despertaba sospechas. En varias ocasiones Ia policia
le pidi6 P. incluso le forz6 a despo1arse de sus atuendos6
Par su parte, el grupo Arte Calle, compuesto par estudiantes de arte, tambien bas6
su trabajo en tacticas guerrilleras. Sus acciones consistieron en presentaciones
sorpresivas en eventos, en su rnayoria dentro del circu ito artistico. Uno de sus
trabajos mas conocidos, No queremos intoxicamos( 1988). consisti6 en interrumpir
un panel sabre el "Concepto del Arte" que tenia Iugar en Ia sede de Ia UNEAC
(Union Nacional de Escritores y Artistas cle Cuba) Los miembros se presentaron
vistienclo ca misetas con el nombre del grupo y mascaras antigas. Aderm1s,
rortahan carteles parafraseando consignas revolucionarias, dotandolas rle
282
contenidos relativos al arte: "Arte o Muerte. jVenceremosl" "Senores criticos
sepan que no les tenernos absolutamente ningun miedo."7 '
A pesar de tratarse de dos propuestas esteticamente afines, Ia bibliograffa
producida en los Estados Unidos ha ignorado el trabajo de KMAN y, par el
contrario, resenado con acuciosidad el de Arte Calle. Esto sucede tambien con
acciones inspiradas en un mi smo tema realizadas par el grupo NADA en Miami y
par el grupo Provisional y Maid ito Menendez en La Habana.
NADA fue fundado en 1984, a raiz de una conversaci6n entre Adalberto Delgado y
Fred Snitzer. Cont6 con seis miembros fundadores, tres de elias cuba nos Delgado,
Fernando Garcia yJose Gonzalez Boada. Segun narra Delgado, en 1985 organizaron
una actividad en respuesta a una exposici6n de artistas neoyorquinos que tenia
Iugar en el Lowe Art Museum de Miami. Justo frente al edificio, en uno de los 1
jardines que flanquean Ia entrada, aparcaron un enorme carnian total mente vacfo
y con apenas un r6tulo que leia 'limonada for NADA". A medida que los invitados
se acercaban aI Iugar de cam ino al museo, los miembros del grupo les ofrecian un 1
vasa de limonada. El gesto tenia Ia frescura de Ia ex-centrico y dirigia una crfticaa
Ia instituci6n par desatender el arte local y verlo como un producto periferico l
1
Tres anos despues, Provisional y Maldito Menendez protagonizaron una protcsta
similar en La Habana A Ia saz6n, Robert Rauschenberg presentaba Ia mayor
exposici6n que se recuerde en Ia ciudad, ocupando las principales salas de las )
instituciones mas importantesn Durante una conferencia de prensa de
Rauschenberg en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Menendez se present6
ataviado como un indigena y portando area \' flechas; se sent6 en el piso, justa ]
frente al artista, y permaneci6 en silencio y asintiendo durante todo eleven to. Par
su parte, los miembros de Provisionalle obsequiaron una pintura con Ia frase"Very
Good, Raushenberg" y el supuestoretrato de Hatuey, I primer heroe conocido en
Ia historia cubana y coincidentemente tambien indigena Ademas, lograron .acer
que Rauschenberg autografiara un cartel anunciando su exposici6n.
Esta limitante intelectual de valorar con diferente vara el adentro y el afuera, se
l
debe a Ia asuncion de una falsa dicotomia segun Ia cual el arte producido en
La Habana seria de vanguardia - par aquello de estar informado par Ia dindrnirJ
de Ia Revoluci6n --, mientra s el de Miami - don de se concentra Ia mayor park d'.:
r xilio· -- se ria conservaclor y reaccionarin Hay dos aspectos clave en J:la
suposici6n. Prirnerarnentc, cl exilio cubtJno estaria formadopar Ia oligarquia r~: ' 1"-
quevia afectados sus in teres JSconcl ascenso al poder de los comunistasen CJ.
Este estereotipo sigue t!Sl mlo muy arraigado hoy, a pesar de que tan ten•t ~:; ":
como en 1965, el e<ilio cubano se llabia liversificado con el exodo de Cama1 i'.::,.
(integrado mayonnente par profesionalesy pequeiios empresarios) yen 1980 ~.~ : r,
una transformac i6n radical con Ia oleada del Mariel, que incluyo amplios sectC'
populares El segundo aspecto estaria geograficamente determinado y se r S' rrr:;
en Ia idea de que siendo Mi81 1i una ciuclad balneario, turistica, seria incapa. J~
procluci r alga cultura!mente 1ci lid1l · La ,;uma dl; cstos factorcs 8S concluyt, 1', ., ·
arte producido en ella seria par fumza nostalgico y elitista, ode aeropuerto
La realidad, sin embargo, es ot1a. En buena medida, el arte en el exilio ha cubierto
zonas de Ia cultura que permanecieron ignoradas ohan sido objeto cle censura bajc
Ia dictadura Par ella, tampoco se puede aislar esta producci6n bajo el pretext de
que no aborda "temas cubanos . Entre las propuestas mas significativas en este
sentido se encuentran Ia inve tigaci6n sabre Ia estetica de las quincea ii e1 <S
desarrollada por Cesar Trasobares y Ia cultura del cabaret par Carmel ita TropicanaL
Asimismo, las expresiones de Ia violencia sabre el cuerpo femenino en Ia obra
J
temprana de Ana Mendieta y Ia reflexi6n sabre los medias de comunicaci6n C'l
Tony Labat constituyen asuntos practicamente ine ploraclos par artistas de Ia ls1il.
a pesar de constituir fen6menos pertinentes a Ia cultura cubana contemporane2.
j
 Umitados por los prejuicios. sena.lados, muchos autores han pa.sado par alto
rocesos y artistas de gran mteres que tndudablemente formaran parte de Ia
~istoria del arte nacional cuando Ia actual coyuntura hist6rica de Ia dictadura sea
uperada 12 En el presente ensayo intentaremos continuar lo iniciado par Tania
~ruguera con Ana Mendieta ydescubrir las "huellas de sangre cubana" derramada
en acciones (de arte) realizadas en cualquier parte para integrarlas al discurso
hist6rico existente sabre el arte del perfomance
Las casas en su Iugar: El verdadero Volumen I
Si tomaramos con seriedad Ia tesis de Luis Camnitzer segun Ia cual el movimiento
guerrillero Tupamaro es p~rte de un,a trad ici6,n conceptual isla latinoamericana
que se interseca con Ia poltttca, 13 sen a muy dtftcil ftJar el comtenzo de Iaaventura
cubana en el arte de Iaacci6n. Podrfa senalar (desde Ia izquierda) el secuestro del
corredor de autos Juan Manuel Fangio par miembros del Movimiento 26 de Julio
en 1958; o bien (desde Ia derecha, LPDr qu e no7) el gesto ambiguo del ex
presidente Ramon Grau San Martin durante Ia invasion de Bahia de Cochinos
(1 961), al colocar una enorme pancarta en Ia fachada de su cas a que leia
"Venceremos". lnclu so, siendo tan osado como este au tor, pod ria aventurar Ia
tesis del ap6stol Jose Marti como precursor del performance al de jar su abrigo en
Ia casa de los Baralt cuando sali6 a las ca lles he Iadas de Nueva York en Ia vispera
de su viaje a Ia Isla para iniciar Ia Guerra de lndependencia (1895) 1" Esto tendrfa
Ia vent ja de dotar al genera con Ia aureola de santidad que rodea a todo lo
relacionado con el heroe nacional cubano. Sin embargo, nos limitaremos a
considerar como acciones artfsticas aquellas que han sido realizadas con plena
conocim iento e intenci6n de interferir el curso de Ia historia del arte, aunque en
ocasiones dichas interferencias se realizaran desde terrenos ajenos a los
tradicionalmente percibidos como artisticos (par ejemplo, un estadio de pelota )
El mi to construido por el discurso oficial cubano y convertido en dogma par
portavoces locales es que todo comenz6 con Iaexposici6n Volumen 1(1980), como
el propio titulo parece afirmar:: Lo cierto es que las expresiones pioneras del arte
de aceion cuba nose encuentran en otros lug ares ymomentos, de modo que resulta
utiI r "pasar brevemente Ia historia
En st: investigaci6n sabre el performance en Cuba, La Cronologfa ( 1998- 2001), el
arti:;!] y curador Glexis Novoa seiiala a Samuel Feij6o como un precursor que
instir'ivamente tom6 elementos del happening dadaista y los aplico a sus
J pres• ''taciones y conferencias "EI publico espcraba ansioso de ver lo que traia en
su ir. '.. parable jaba o balsa, de Ia cual sacaba cualquier objeto (zapatos, boniatos,
pied•os) para argumentar una opinion o defender una tesis "1' Feij 6o fue un
connrtado folclorista cubano, incansable promotor del arte popular yfundador/editor
de i!Tportantes revistas culturales. Afincado en Santa Clara, entonces provincia de
Las \' lias, fue sin embargo una figura muy influyente en todo el espectro cultural
de Ia Isla y en particular en Cienfuegos, ciudad en Ia que aparecen las primeras
mar,ifestaciones propiamente perforrmiticas Aida Menen ez ha corllentaclo quea
finil 1·'S de Ia decada de 1960 ar.ompanaba aFeiJDO en el campo donde manipulaban
el or ~·~ n de las bostas de vaca, asurniendo que realizaban una obra de arte. Poco
des,! es, Benjamin Duarte, qui en habia rebasado los setenta ai'\os, "realizaba
eventos para los cuales se vestia de col ores especificos, que a su vezdefinian Ia
col ur ~ci6n de Ia comida que preparaba y digerfa en el acto". 17
Por esta misma epoca, artistas j6venes crecidos fuera de Cuba y entrenados en
esc•wlas profesionales de arte establecieron los fundamentos del genera y trazaron
varioscaminos tematicos. lndudablemente, Ia figuradescollante es Ana Mendieta,
quif:n desarrollo desde 1972 una fuerte propuesta afincacla en Ia naturaleza
periormativa del ritual. Mendieta integr6 elementos de Ia tradici6n afrocubana de
Ia santeria a un modelo mucho mas complejo en el que predomina Ia noci6n del
caracter sagrado del cuerpo femenino, que es sometido a varias etapas desde Ia
agresi6n fisica y simb61ica, sacra lizaci6n ritual (a menudo con el empleo de
materiales como sangre, tierra y plumas), hasta Ia transfiguraci6n en una silueta
(con Ia forma de una anima orante) que se integra en el paisaje naturai. 1B Su
capacidad para apropiar y sintetizar aspectos del Arte-Tierra, el Arte Corporal y el
Feminismo, Ia convirti6 en una especie de "compendia" de las diferentes corrientes
experimentales del momenta. Asi. al visitar Cuba, Mendieta funcion6 como un
catalizador para j6venes creadores avidos de nuevas posibilidades expresivas.
La apropiaci6n de elementos de los sistemas sincreticos afrocubanos yde culturas no-
occidentales en general. ha tenido continuadores tan disfmiles como Leandro Soto,
el mas cercano de su generaci6n aMendieta, Marfa Magdalena Campos Pons, quien
reorient6 su trabajo hacia Ia sexualidad /racialidad de su cuerpo desde un contacto
inicial con obras de Lorna Simpson y Carrie Mae Weems durante una residencia en
Bostonwy Manuel Mendive, cuya obra entremezcla Ia pintura sabre Ia pie I desnuda
de bailarines con danzas en forma de espectaculares procesiones. Mendive obtuvo
el Primer Premia en Ia Bienal de La Habana de 1986, convirtiendose en el primer
artista en ganar un premia internacional con un performance.
Par su parte, en San Francisco, Carlos Gutierrez-Solano y Tony Labat, introdujeron
una variante del performance de tono menos grave y a menudo humoristico, Ia
cual ha sido muy atractiva para los creadores cubanos.2° Gutierrez-Solano
parodiaba Ia tecnica del chorreado abstracto-expresionista al realizar especies de
exorcismos rituales.2 1 Eventualmente, abandonarfa su trabajo como artista para
desarrollar una carrera como curador. En 1976, al trasladarse al San Francisco Art
Institute, Labat comenz6 una serie de trabajos burlescos como Humores cardinales
(Cardinal Humors, 1977), en el que apareci6 disfrazado con una mascara y una
vestimenta de apariencia zoomorfa sabre un escenario en el que habia una diana
de fondo El personaje se virti61fquidos de cuatro colo res en vasijas rotuladas como
"sangre", "flema", "calera" y"melancolia", representando "los cuatro fluidos jefes ...
responsables porIa salud y Ia disposici6n del indivicluo "z,
Curiosamente, el motivo del "chorreado" es recurrente en artistas que buscan
provocar reacciones en el publico En el Festival de Ia Pieza Carta (1979),2oJulio
Garcia Pirosmani "apretaba sendos tubas de 61eo hoi andes, que derramaba sobre
sus biceps con gesto de exhibicionismo fisiculturista", mientras derribaba una
improvisada Espiral de Tatlin hecha con los muebles de Ia casa. Con esta acci6n,
Pirosmani mostraba "Ia mediocridad de los materiales de arte procedentes de
paises socia listas".:: Yel propio Novoa tuvo su "episodio" de chorreado cuando
realiz6 Noes solo Ia que ves (1986) En Ia galerfa, un monitor mostraba un video
de un concierto de heavy metal con las bandas Venom, 1\iletallica y Slayer. De
repente, el artista atraves6 un papel que habia colocado cerrando un acceso al
espacio y apareci6 frente al publico vestido con atuendo de rockero y blandiendo
un cuchil lo Cort6 Ia vestimenta y extrajo sus "tripas" al tiempo que chorreaba
sangre Lu go se revolc6 en el suelo y al cabo se retiro tranquilamente :·_
Labat habfa llegado a San Francisco desde Miami, donde reali z6 sus primeras
acciones en 197 4. AIa saz6n se encontraba estudiando en Miami Dade Jr. College,
donde utiliz6 un grupo de estudiantes para crear una linea al piede una escalinata
Sus acciones tenian Iugar en espacios abiertos y a menudo dentro del propio
centro de estudios. El artista recuerda que Ia escena del arte en Miami no era
muy receptiva hacia este tipo de trabaJos y, aconsejado par un profesor, decidi6
continuar sus estudios en San Francisco Art Institute, donde eventual mente pas6
a enseiiar.;· Entre sus trabajos destacan algunos relacionados con los medias
masivos de comunicaci6n, como The Gong Show (1978) e In ten to de secuestro
(Kidnap Attempt, 1978)' 7 En Combate (Fight, 1981). Lahat se licencir\ comn
boxeador profesional en el estado de California durante un ano En ese tiempo,
convirti6 su taller en un gimnasio funcional, abierto al publico, completamente
 equipado con un ring y equipos para el entrenamiento. El proyecto cu lmino con su
debut dentro de un cartelera de boxeo profesionaLzs
La situacion en Miami cambio progresivamente Entre los factores que pueden
senalarse estuvieron Ia creacion de varias instituciones, el desarrollo de proyectos
de arte publico que tuvieron gran impacto en Ia comunidad artlstica y el estfmulo
de premios, como Ia Beca Cintas para los artistas cubanos.19En este contexto
surgio un grupo de artistas que renovaron Ia produccion artrstica con el uso de
medias como el performance, Ia instalacion y el video. Entre ellos se encontraban
Marfa Brito, Pablo Cano, Adalberto Delgado, Fernando Garcia, KMAN, Cesar
Trasobares yotros. Se trata de una generacion de artistas formados principal mente
en los Estados Unidos, y por Ia ta nto, enfrentados generacionalmente con el
"establishment" dominado por algunos veteranos del Modernismo cubano y por
artistas afines con Ia estetica conservadora de Ia Academia de San Alejandro Este
"enfrentam iento" no tuvo muchas expresiones concretas, pues los artistas jovenes
circulaban dentro del circuito propiamente norteamericano. No obstante, se registro
algun que otro desencuentro, siendo uno muy significativo el protagonizado por Cesar
Trasobares alrededor de Ia exposicion Encuentro cubano (1978)
Desde 1975, Trasobares venia realizando una investigacion sobre Ia estetica de las
quinceaneras y Ia industria desarrollada alrededor de este fenomeno social En
trabajos que adoptaban medias y tecnicas no convencionales, el artista identificaba
las fuentes de los variados estilos Con ellos fabricaba cajas, collages, instalaciones
y esculturas moviles, dos de las cuales sometio a Ia consideracion de los
organizadores de Ia muestra. AI conocer del rechazo de Ia solicitud en virtud de
que no utilizaba "materiales nobles", el artista entendi6 que se trataba de un acto
hipocrita, pues en cierto modo no solo lo exclufa ael, sino tambien a Ia quinceanera
corno personificacion de un gusto de clase y epoca Durante Ia apertura de Ia
exposicion, sin que Iuera invitado, Trasobares acompano a una quinceanera (su
prima), qui en iba ataviada con un vestido trpico y portaba un libra de arte moderno
en su mana. Realizaron recorridos trazando un doble rectangulo y un numero 8, que
en Ia jerga de Ia imaginerfa popular representa una especie de maldicion. Con
posterioridad, Trasobares realizo varios performances con el personaje de Ia
quinceanera en ambientes mas festivos. En ocasiones ha asistido a eventos
disfrazado con vestimentas estrafalarias.>
Otro artista de sumo interes es Fernando Garcia. Sus accione<; solian tomar
forma tos muy diversos, desde un desfile de gloiJos gigantes (Esferas feriadas/
Holiday Spheres, 1984) y una sinfonia de lecturas en diversos idiomas enla Plaza
del Miami Dade Cultural Center, hasta cami natas par un espacio geometricam nte
determinado de Ia ciudad dentro del cual registraba fotograficamente objetos que
tuvieran Ia misma forma (por ejemplo, dentro un cfrculo, una seiial de pare, un
bache en Ia calle, una ventana circular en una casa) Formado en principia como
matematico, Garcia estudio arte en Ia Universidad Estatal de Georgia (1974-1976)
y se traslado en 1976 a Nueva York, donde trabajo como instalador en Ia galeria
de Leo Castelli. Alii se familiari z6con Ia obra de Hanne Darboven, Daniel8uren '
otros conceptualistas europeos AI regresar a Miami en1978, Garcia c;c incorpor6
a Ia esccna del arte miamense con rapidez, desarrollando una obra sui generi>
apegada al conceptualismo y a Ia abstraccion. Su obsesi6n con los numeros y Ia
geometria lo llevo a realizar conteos de elias o calendarios y motivo dos de sus
trabajos mas significativos BH/2 (1981) y En Ia linea (On the line, 1982) Este
evento multidiscipl inario consistio en Ia realizacion simultanea de tres y dos
exposiciones, respectivamente, en espacios no necesa riamente artrsticos. En el
prirnero formaba un triangulo (el titulo es Ia formula matematica para calcular el
area de un triangulo) yen el segundo, una linea. Entre las numerosas acciones se
incluia una enla que el artista llamaba par telefono e irnpartfa instrucciones para
realizar un "dibujo enla linea" ' 1 Garcia trabaJO en Miami Dade Public Library y
realizo varias acciones relacionadas con Ia literatura. Ademas de Ia Sinfonfa de
4
/ectura de Miami (Miami Reading Symphonies, 1984). escribio un poema en
concreto al que titulo Poema concreto (Concrete Poem). en referencia al
movirniento brasileno de igual nombre.
Mas distante, en Puerto Rico, Felix Gonzalez-Torres incursiono en el arte de accion
primero acompanado par otros dos cubanos, Rosa Balsera yJose Perez Mesa. Do~
de sus trabajos efimeros tuvieron Iugar en el Recinto de Rio Piedras de Ia
Universidad de Puerto Rico, donde estudiaban.Jl El primero de estos fue Ia
envoltura con tela de un arbol seco en una plaza muy concurrida (1978) El objetivo era
ver las reacciones de Ia gente yen una resena sobre Ia accion, Gonzalez-Tor res cont6
que los transeuntes no recorda ban que alii habfa un arbol y pensaron que se trataba
de una nueva estatua que develarfan en cualquier momenta. Con posterioridad, el
trio realizo una instalacion effmera con hielo y mascaras de papier mache Gonzalez-
Torres llevo acabo Ia proxima accion solo. Consistio en situar dos personasIrente a
sendos televisores sin senal, a los que estaban conectados por un cable.
En 1979, Gonzalez-Torres se traslado a Nueva York para continuar e tudios.
Durante sus constantes vis itas a Puerto Rico, realizo numerosos proyectos,
incluyendo al me nos dos performances encarnando el personaje de un turista. De
ellos, 6xido. Suer'ios sabre una cam a de hie/a (1982), tuvo Iugar en Ia Caso Aboy,
en el contexto de una exposicion personal. En el, Gonzalez-Torres apareciu vestido
con un traje de bano, se bronceo y se acosto sobre unos bloques de hielo
adoptando Ia pose del Ad an de La Creaci6n de Miguel Angel en Ia Capilla Sixtina ]
y realizo una diatriba contra Ia banalidad de Ia cultura del entretenimiento, wre
obliga a "estar de vacaciones enla tierra propia" JJ Un tercer proyecto, La pla,1a
(1983). nunca realizado, consistiria en una video-instalacion y performance en las
que el artista imaginaba Ia extrafi a situacion de una playa (Iugar de escape para
el vacacionista y para el emigrado caribeiio) en Ia que convergfan el turi sta de
turno y el balsero o yolero llegado de Cuba, Ia Republica Dominicana o Haiti ,.
Este nucleo de artistas formo una avanzada del arte de accion cubano en el e.ilio,
que se alimento de una "vena popular" al mismo tiempo critic ay celebratoriade Ia
cultura propia. Su exlstencia misma como formas de experimentacion que en IaIsla
tuvieron enorrnes limitantes par el dirigismo cultural del perfodo, imrone el
reconocimiento de su contribuci6n al arte nacional. Como demuestra esta expo~i ·"i0n,
Cuba march6 a Ia zaga de sus contemporaneos enAmerica Latina, a difercr;i3 du
lo sucedido en d~cadas anteri ores Habrfa que esperar hasta que una pr Jf ·: ta
arlistica renovadora adquiriera forma y tuviera repercusi6n internacion,>l. [. c
momenta sc produjo amcdiados de los ochenta yestuvn marcado por el prFr': · ;,1;,,
de Ia accion grupal y Ia aparicion de figuras descollantes, que se clesarroi i~ t . a
plenitud ocolapsaron en Ia decada siguiente
Volumen II
En terminos de Ia practica estrictamente performatica, Ia aportacion de V J!~ IIr ''ll
//(1980) e~ oignificatiVd, aunqueno volurninosa •En primer Iugar, algunosulli!>J .I"
orgJnizaron y participaron en el Festival de Ia Pieza Carta (1979). en una ca ··~ de
playa en las afucras cl e La Habana . En segundo Iugar, Leandro Soto y, e11 ~Ti L " ;r
medida. Gustavo Perez Monzon en compar1fa de sus estudiantes, rea lizoron
performances y acciones efirneras con cierta regularidad
Nose han publicado testimonios graticos del Festival, pero Novoa ha prol. ~rc 'clo
un recuento bastante pormenorizado de algunas acciones:
En Querida Stella, Gustavo Perez Monzon mostraba su admiracion por Ia
obra de Frank Stella de una manera muy sutil. Sobre una tela a rall il>
colocada en el pi so, acosto a una actriz cuya silueta marco en Ia tela pn1
medio de pequenos alfileres, como si Iuera un patron de costura. Rccmt1
 producci6n, que evolucion6 hacia las propuestas ,conque se harra conocida
internacionalmente La res1stenc1a del cuerpo, extra1da l1 teralmente del d1scurso
oficial delllamado "Perrodo Especial", su imbricaci6n con el tema de Ia migraci6n
desde Ia perspectiva de tradic iones indrgenas no-occidentales y el uso de
materi ales organicos, denotaron una absorci6n de las influencias de sus dos
maestros. AI establecerse en el circuito internacional de arte, Bruguera fue invitada
aensei'iar en Ia Universidad de Chicago, donde permanece como docentehoys1
En 1994, Sandra Ceballos y Ezequiel Suarez fundaron el Espacio Aglutinador, un
espacio alternativo en Ia casa de Ia primera. Allr han tenido Iugar 9lgunas de las
acciones mas importantes de los ultimos anos La exposici6n de Angel Delgado
marco un momenta definitorio por cuanto dej6 clara que Aglutinador combatirra
Ia corriente de censura y autocensura predominante en Ia escena de arte. Los
propios Ceballos y Suarez realizaron varios performances. En una ocasi6n se
sentaron uno frente a otro por horas sin hacer nada. Como un homenaje a Carlos
Garaicoa, quien realizaba instalaciones fotograficas sabre las ruinas
arquitect6nicas de Iaciudad, Suarez realiz6 Gada artista que se va es un fragmento
que sepierde (1995), en el cual golpeaba desde un andamio el techo y las paredes
dela galerra, provocando pequeiios derrumbes.ss
Por ul timo, Lazaro Saavedra mantuvo su catedra en eliSA a Ia par que trabajaba
en su obra personal. Despues de su experiencia con Ia microbrigada, Saavedra se
concr.r:tr6 en Ia instalaci6n y esporadicamente real i?6 acciones en el contexto de
sus eJ\posiciones. Par ejemplo, Cafda libre (1997) consisti6 en cortar los hi los de
los que colgaban del techo numerosas marionetas, formadas como en un batall6n.
Su principal contribuci6n, sin emba rgo, ha sido Ia tutorra de un grupo de trece
estudi ntes que con forma ron el grupo ENEMA en el aiio 2000. ENEMA comenz6
con una metodologra en el estudio del performance basada en Ia reinterpretaci6n
colectiva de obras clasicas del genera. Par ejemplo, acciones rea lizadas par una
person. eran realizadas par todos los miembros del grupo, compa rtiendo Ia carga
de trabajo que estuviera implrcita Asr, permanecieron amarrados par una saga a
Ia cintura par una semana en Iugar de una no y sostuvieron en los brazos un bloque
de ir.lo hasta que se derriti6, pero alternadamente para evitar danos fisicos
E NE~.1A publico ademas una revista y produjo videos parodiando Ia television al
tiempo que documentaban sus propias obras (Notinemas) De esta experiencia
doc~ .'e han surgido Jlgunas figuras originales. como JJmes Bonachea, Dioni s
Flore ' 'I Ariel Orozco -Adem as. ENEMA sent61as bases para una practica grupal
revi'.~' . da con grupos como 609, que esta integrado e1clusivamente por muJeres
I yar .ria ternas relacionados coni a problemcitica del cuerpo femenino.
En cxilio, aparecen en las dos ultimas decadas un grupo de figuras que
c.
inccutJran Ia accion en su arsenal expresivo. Felipe Dulzaides en San Francisco,
dond~ comparte catedra con Tony Labat: Maritza Molina y George Sanchez-
Calc' .;~on en Miami: Allora y Calzadilla en Puerto Rico son algunos de los mas
des~i!cados. En Mexico, se radicaron Francisco Lastra, que Iuera miembro de
Pro•• 'lila I c Israel Le6n, quicnc3 11an rca lizado acciones ocasion lmenlc
Por . proc dcncia eatra 1• lcs e:forn~a :1ccs cle Dulzaides tienen un fuerte acento
histr::inico, pero en ocasiones esta estilizaci6n cede paso a un trabajo mas
abst:acto. Sus performances a dC10 con Rene Francisco Rodriguez. a rarz de una
resi encia de este profesor en San Francisco Art Institute, sobresalieron par
aprovecllar Ia relaci6n obra-documentaci6n alternando el punta de vista de cada
unoen el registro videografico Por su parte, Molina ha comenzado adespuntar par
una obra afincada en Ia revision crrtica de las relaciones tradicionales hombre-
mujer En Cargando tradiciones (Carrying Traditions, 2005), tira de una carreta
ca u~ da de hombre vestirlns con trr1jes de negocio AntP.s, en CuiJiertA ror lA
tradici6n (Cnverud by Tradition, 2003), se tendi6 sabre Ia tierra y cubri6 su rostra
con "nvestido blanco mientras dejaba el resto de su cuerpo desnudo.
La comunidad artfstica del exilio se enriqueci6 con Ia nueva oleada de artistas
emigrados a principios de los anos noventa. Juan-Si Gonzalez -en un recorrido
que comprendi6 Costa Rica. Miami y Ohio-. Leandro So toenArizona y Alejandro
Lopez en Nueva York, han continuado cultivando el media. Para el primero el
cambia fue menos complejo debido a que su practica se apoya esencialmente en
el cuerpo. Soto obtuvo un puesto docente desde el cual se mantiene activo, si
bien ha girado cada vez mas al teatro. Lopez, en cambia, ha vista limitada su
producci6n por el costa de sus complejas escenograffas Preocupados por Ia
dispersion de Ia memoria hist6rica del perrodo precedente, Glexis Novoa y Emilio
Perez realizaron una investigaci6n que culmina en La Cronologfa (1998). exhibida
en Ia galerra del Miami Dade Community College, reactivando un interes por el
media que habra mermado con el ex itoecon6mico de los nuevas artistas cubanos.
Novoa habra protagonizado algunos momentos significativos de los ochenta,
realizando performances individuales como AI final todos bailan juntos (1987). un
concurso de break-dance que trajo a Ia galerra los personajes de La Habana
"underground": o como parte del grupo Provisional Con La Cronologfa, ahara
desde el exilio, Novoa rea liz6 un ultimo homenaje a su generaci6n y a lo que esta
ha representado para Ia tradici6n del performance cubano. Lo que Bruguera hizo
por Mendieta desde 1988, Novoa lo ha hecho par sus contemporaneos, dispersos.
desterrados y en peligro de ser borrados de Ia memoria del arte cubano par los
demonios del olvido. lncluso sac6 a Fidel Castro de su rehabilitaci6n para
confrontarlo personal mente con el pasadosqSu dedicaci6n ygenerosidad han sido
un motor e inspiraci6n de esta investigaci6n por continuar ..
No par mucho madrugar amancce mas temprano, Fototeca de Cuba, La Habana Vieja,
1988. Alonso Mateo, Gle~is Novoa y i\rte Calle realizaron acciones durante Ia apertura de
es ta muestra, que fue curdda par Ruben Torre' Llorca.
"1 ... 1usaba su nombre y sus titulos pero ponia el aiio en que las piezas eran reconstruidds,
par eremplo, 1986 6 1996. Era un intento de revivirla, de alguna manera ." Goldberg,
RoseLee, "Entrevista," Tania Bruguera, 51. International Art Exhibition La Biennale di
Venezia (Chicago Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, 20051. 16.
Bruguera seiiala que deja de rehacer las obras de Mendieta cuando supo que uno ~
estudiantes de Historia del arte realizarian una tesis sabre ella, pues tom6 esto como
seiial de que fina lmente se apreciariasu legado. Sin embargo, aunque se rcalizo un festi,:al
con elnombre de Ana MenditJld en Ia UNEAC (Union .Jacional de [ scritores '/ Artistas de
Cuba. 1999), su ob1a - como Ia de todos los artislas del performc,nce· siyu8 r·st,,:tJo
au ~ ,mte de las salas del i~r1useo N<rciOI.al de Br·'las :utes rlrsde que' 1"1-u en t:li,J ' .1
t" uie fs( .';.Jrd,; tllf\ 1Sl.rt'J ~r. 198i .
.\ Fidel Cil,tiO hil descrito :u regimen comn una "Dictaduru del rrrlct111 dr!", Lrn•;r '
uili;-Jclo por los te0riUJSdcl i.J<lr\ionJO-IPilll'i' lll" Jlilr:l rlt: 1rib" nl < i s t ~ma '1Cid 1:·;td.
5 La rc:6111:a ofic ial pre,rnta cntcrm!l10' m il i lrlrr~ s ,lc "d ~'uC: •1n" y "twici0n " los ,;""u' lie
rersonJs que abandonan Iii i ~ la. Estn supone un ca5tiqn que. en t ! ca s0 ric lu cultura,
corr csponde a hacerlos desa pt~rer c r de Ia memoriJ historira.
6 En oc<1si6n de haber sido invitado r.omo artistaa una exposici1in. Ktvl1\N c presen t6C8mo
c
Mr. Jupiter. con una enormeesferd anillada cubri entlo su cabeza .lomo pd rt ~ rle su aw6n
durante lil i!pertura. el artislil istribuyn oanfletnscnn comP nta rio ~ rritir01r'lntril l ig 1r si1
El dueiio de Ia galeria reqlllrio que abandonard ol r.spoLio. tras lo cual el resto de los
artr.,tas en Ia exposicion recoyio sus obras y se mar charon df:jilnclu al publico atunito. El
gesto provoco queun critico local bautizara al grupo como Food Spot, aunque nn se trataba
de un colectivo de artistas. Entre elias se oncontraban Teo Fr ytes '{Ana Pulido. Kl\.1,\1 !,
entrevistil con el aulor., liami, cliciembre de 2007.
Pnra un Pstudio del trilllilJO de los qrupo<; Arte Calle. Prnvisionill v Rilual Art-ne. cn'l 'W it~~
Rachel Weiss, "Performing Revolution Arte Calle, Grupo Provisional, anrl the Response to
the Cuban National Crisis, 1986-1989." Collectivism after Modernism The Art of Social
Imagination after 1945 (Minneapoli<; University of Minnesota Press, 20071
8 Adi!lberto Delgado, Entrevistas con el autor, Miami, noviembre-diciembre, 2007. El grupo
NAOJ\ tu•;n 1~normr: l•_•:onJncia en Ia r.srr. nil ric ~.1 i:lm: ',' t. niJ,Lnns ric un illlO, al c,poiJCr
en el Museo Cubano de .~rte y Cultura en 1985, habia riuplicado su membresia anginal.
inr~rpr•ranr!o se Ia<; artistas cub:mos Raf:J cl Salazar y Esteban Vallejo.
 La exposici6n se titulaba Rauschenberg Overseas Culture lnterchange(R.O.CJ) y provoc6
una oleada de critica. En una resefia sabre Ia ocurrido en Ia conferencia, Tone I comentaba
que "La extensa y agotadora muestra esparcida par Robert Rauschenberg en La Habana
nos recuerda, inevitablemente, Ia condici6n de insularidad que pesa . . sabre las artes
plasticas cubanas." Mas adelanteapunta que tiene "Ia idea de que lees posible apropiarse
impunemente de todo, de cualquier cosa para hacer su propia obra." Y culmina: "esta
operaci6n, intrinsecamente aparatosa, fue recibida con reservas, o con una mezcla de
ironia e indiferencia par una parte importante - tal vez Ia mas activa- de los artistas
plas ticos cubanos." Antonio Eligio (Tonel) " Paso Rauschenberg sabre el mar",
Revoluci6n vCultura (La Habana Mayo 1988). 39-47.
10 En fecha reciente, el articulista del peri6dico the New York Times, llovia sabre moJado al
atacar Ia construcci6n del Carnival Center for the Performing Art en Miami aduciendo que
"the center is yet another case of Miami's overreaching in a desperate bid to be taken
seriously." (el centro es otro caso de Ia exageraci6n de Miami en su desesperado intento
parser tomada seriamente) Kirk Semple, "Fits, starts and painful bumpsfor Carnival Center
in Miami", the New York Times, December 29, 2007.
11 Carmelita Tropicana, cuyo nombre se refiere al famoso cabaret de La Habana, cre6 el
personaje de Pingalito Betancourt, un de autob(rs que aparece en obras como Leche de
amnesia (Milk of Amnesia, 19821. Memorias de Ia revoluci6n (Memories of theRevolution,
1987) y Chicas (2000) Se apropia de Ia figura del comediante de cabaret para burlarse de
los estereotipos tropicalistas.
12 Una parte considerable de las abras de arte cuba no del siglo XI. que se exponen hoy en
el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana fueron realizadas en el exilio durante las
guerras de independencia (1868- 1902)
13 Luis Camnitzer. Conceptualism in Latin American Art. Didactics of Liberation (Austin
University of Texc1 s Press, 2007)
14 Para un am\lisi> polemico subre el Iugar rle este episodio en Ia ronstruCCion del
martirologio martiano, vea Antonio JosePonte. "EI abrigo dPaire," Encuentro Cubano. no
1fi-17, primavera-verano (Madrid, 2000). 45-52.
15 Volurnen I, Centro de Arte lnternacronal, La Habana, 1980. En esta exposicion colec tiva.
inaugurada el14 de enero de 1980. participaron los artistas Jose Bedia, Juan Francisco Elsa
Padilla, Jose Manuel Fors, Flavia Garciandia, Israel Leon, Rogelio Lope. Marin (Gory), Gustavo
Perez Monzon, Ricardo RodrigueL Brey, Tomas Sanchez, Leandro So toy Ruben Torres Llorca.
16 Glexis Novoa. "La Consagraci6n de Ia Jodedera," Killing Time, catalogo de exposici6n
(New York Exit Art. 2007- 2008) Tambicn Soto ha sefialado a Samuel Fei)6o como el
precursor del performance en Cuba . Ver: Leandro Soto, "Performance in Cuba in the 1980s
APersonal Te<tiruonio." Corpus D,Jiecti. f'crformance Art of thr .i\merica~. eel. Cocn F u ~ co
ILondon and New Yorf • Routlerlne. 2u00). 764 -274.
·, 7 G!r x's NiJ\'Ol. 1h'd. El ,:r rtr>r .lfl'!nla "EsCLI~irr > o qur: rnu, leju:, rit~ e>te r:ontr.\tO. enei Pui\
dr. 1971, el artist?. CJial,n Antol'i u:mlrla (8'1rct!lon:r. Esp;r ii~ 19 1!2) eliyicra elli11Sill0
mc t:·.u IWii redli;ar una :le su.. irr:ciOJl!,,, Ril:lal en r,'r n tro L'o:orrs." He odoplcltlu L . t<l
pl t;:~ na de Nn·/ !3. c i v~::tnrJ rHr~ rr; HI :.=: m.1rin. (]C considu 1r L \P ' t ~iOnt,:) i l ,t: , iii\ t~ S o lL~
1 31
II amado "artc po 'ular" cornJ contriiJu•,-ente;; ai desarro llodel arte de ;,ccion en Cut.. . L.!.>
se ~ara c ione'> r.n tr~ el arte "cocido" y "crudo" entorpecen und compresi6nmas cornpleta
del hccho artfst1cO. ( Ad ~ma s . ilqui w>ult'l que r~ l "uudo" Duarte eraun experto cocinuo I
18 P.iio un c~ t u d i t' tiC IJ nbra cle lviendietJ. r ~v i sa r OlgJ Vi so. .4na Mrndieta. Earrli Body.
Swlpture at:,/ Perf rmJncc. 197? 1985. catAiogo de exoosicion (Washinqtrn nC
H ! r~ hllorn ~:ltr s c un . cJnLI Sc rlpture Garden. Smithsonion Institution, 2004)
i 9 Lis.1 0 Frei'ilil'l r~lli,a un rerurnto do esto expericncia de Campos Ponsen el rn ~ayo del
c a~d!o
o que a ccr~ pa:ra .;urdPJsp rc t i v~r Everything Is Separa ted by Water(Ne\'! Haven
ami Londrnlndra:oapolis Museum nf rtf Yale UnivPrsity Press, 2007)
20 Tony Labat en el video Babalu (1980) v George SancheL-Colder6n en un vicleo de lo
i:~ ~ ta laLi jn mult:m~dia A : ; ·ait, n~J (1995) pruponen un a.:crcarniento par6Jiw al lerna de Ia
religiosiclad popular. En ambos casas. ejecutan "ceremonias" supuestamente legitimas
con una fuerte carga performatica. Sin embargo, no sc trata de acciones como taL
21 Entrevista con el autor, San Fmncisco, enero de 2008.
22 Tony Labat. Trust Me, catalogo de exposici6n (San Francisco New Langton Arts, 2005)
34- 35. En otros trabajos, Labat explota cierta estetica "outsider" en Ia linea de Humare;
cardinales. En una ocasi6n, se present6 enmascarado y desnudo en un escenar io en el
que una banda tocaba musica en vivo, mientras Labat se balanceaba sabre un bote conuna
esfera colgada de sus testfculos. La pie a estaba inspirada en Ia crisis del Mariel einclufa
una llamada telef6nica a Ia madre de Labat para detallar Ia receta del arroz congri, que
daba titulo al performance Arroz y frijoles negros (Black Beans 'n Rice, 1980 I El ar ti3ta ya
habia realizado otros performances con bandas de Punk Rock alas que llama ThL' ~sshales
y The Purls (1979)
23 El Festival de Ia Pieza Carta tuvo Iugar en una casa de playa alquilada en Brisas del Mar
en las afueras de La Habana, en 1979. '
24 Glexis Novoa, Ibid.
25 IIJid.
J
26 Correspondencia electr6nica (diciembre. 2007) y entrevista con el au tor, San Fr<lllcisco
enero, 2008. '
27 En The Gong Show, el artista apareci6 con Bruce Pollack en el programa de tc!f;visi6n 1
mofandose del presentador con una actuaci6n disparatacla par Ia que fueron ex~u ls dos'
Despues, intent6 el secuestro del artista Lowell Darling, un candidato a Gob~:rr, J dor de
California avido de publicidad (Tony Labat, Ibid I
28 Tony Labat. Ibid.
1
29 Helen Kohen recuerda que entre las instituciones mas activas en Ia epoca eotaban el
Metropolitan Museum (primero en Kendall y luego en The Biltmore. Coral Gabl : ~ ). Lcwe
Art Museum, University of Miami, Museo Cuba no de Arte 'I Cultura, Bass Museum. ~.l rar~i
l
Dade Public Library, que contaba con un programa de exposiciones extraordir.ar:Js en
muchas de sus sucursales y North Miami Center of Contemporary Art (predecesor del
actual Museum of Contemporary Art) Correspondencia clcctr6nica, 10 de ene1o, i OC'H.
30 Entrevista con el autor, Miami, noviernbre de 2007.
31 Gail Fix, "Fernando GJrcia: Be[,.,een Past ami Present." Co1,ia mimeogra fiaJa J~ •rnli bajo
de Ia clase "Art History 698", del Or. Olson, Spring 1980, 8. Arch iva Vasari, Miami-Dade
Public Library. Agradezco Ia invaluable ayuda de Helen Kohen. qui en esta a t a1go del
Archivo Vasari. Kohen realiz6 una exposici6n retros pectiva de Fernando Garcia 1:1 2003,
pero desalortunadamente nose edi t6 ninguna publicacion par carencia de fon•lns
32 E\entualmente Balsera abandonarfa las artes visuales par Ia litera lura 'I Peru, I ·h,~. a se
convert iria en un fotografo profesionnl con una larga tra ,LCtoria Pn la UnivP. · ..J de
Pul'rto Ric0.
33 Este texto estilba emi to Pnuna pizarra nPar.l co!gnda en Ia r Jred !\I igual q~; ; ·· ·'nc. .•do
Garcr,,, parte de lil obra ten ,pr:ma cle Gon;ilw-T nrcs estuvtl insn::acla en la poe::. 1 •·.Ia
inclu·,o tilt rccrtal de ldpc•eta Ale ida , madnr. ami[lil cerc<m;i ncl ar ti'ia, rprien 1;! i en
h "JIIJ iJII;fllllCillncil d.:: rurJOfln l:iL•.·
Sob~~ ~ ~ 'l~HU h' ' , liJ " d l~J. ·.! L!~: EJ·.~-~ FuCi.:! .), ,r:L!i'\ :1('1.. .• ··;, -,~~ .r.'."'· L:c_~ ";.l I ~ , .\,
ra t;riPgo tL r 'pns:ci6n (Nue1·a ·, o r ~ : El t:l.r•;to del Barr:J. lOOGI
35 ParJ un es tudio de Ia P\posici6n V umen/, aqui reba utizada Ct·rro V,1,lumen II. ,. ,,. . .ar:
Luis Camnitzer. Nmv Ari at Cuba ( ustin: University of br1s Pr P;s, 19 \I 1\umr' ' ' · ._r o
runtitne muchds imprecis ionr s. pwvr.e n1uLhd inlorrnJcron soiJrr ic e xp o ~ i(•;.. :.Js
protiJgonistas
36 GIPxis Novoa. IIJid
37 Leandro Soto. ILid. J
38 Alejandro G. Alonso. "Una acci6n plasticd ... Revoluci6n )' Cul/1/r.? (La Habana, rr3·r·' 1e
1986) Recorte de prensa. Archivo Glexis Novoa, 1iami. Este eventu marco urn · ,· 1 ~r·nte
institucionalizaci6n del media. pero encontronaws posteriores er1trP. funriorwios•, art;"liiS
dieron al traste con es te proceso y a principros de los noventa el performa 1~'" I .ti
desaparecido de los proyramas.
39 Leandro So to. "'C ompartir Ia vista." Revoluci6n yCultura. no. 7. 1984. Archivo Glex i ~ i JrJvorJ,
Miami.
J
l
40 Gll',iS NO\ OJ. Ihid.
J
.I
 41 Paralelamente a Ia Bienal de La Nabana, se organizan eventos para aprovechar Ia
presencia internacional. Entre las numerosas acciones realizadas en este contexto
estuv;eron Estudw de taller(1997). de Tam a Bruguera y Fuera de revolucwnes 12000), de
Ezequ iel Suarez

42 Glexis Novoa, Ibid.

43 Glex· Novoa, entrevista con el autor, Miami, noviembre de 2007.
44 Entre las exposiciones que fueron censuradas se encuentran las personales de Tomas
Esson (A tarro partido II, Galeria 23 y 12, 1988). del grupo ABTV (Homenaje a Hans Haacke)
y del duo Rene Francisco y Ponjuan (Artista melodrama tical. ambas en el Castillo de Ia
Red I Fuerza en 1989. Asimi smo, Ia~ exposiciones colectivas Nueve alquimistas y un ciego
(Galeria L, Universidad de La Habana, 1989), par Ia cual fue despedida su directora Marta
Limia y Arte Cubano Actual, que debi6 abrir en un espacio centrico de La Habana el15 de
noviembre de 1991, durante Ia Bienal de La Habana. La muestra fue pospuesta varias
veceo. y finalmente trasladada a las afuerds de Ia ciudad. Algunos miembros de los grupos
Art-De, Arte Calle y La Campana fueron detenidos.
45 Prur.1blemente el proyecto performativo reciente mas importante de Juan-Si Gonzalez es
81:\.;ando aCuba (Looking Inside for Cuba, 2001), en el cual el artista visit6 pueblos llamados
Cul12 en varios estados de los Estados Unidos y tom6 fotos frente a edificios pC1blicos,
m'-lOtios y lias, seiialdndo Ianatwaleza amenudo ambigua del desplazamiento ydel e,ilia
46 Cell :as Rodriguez Cardenas redliw algunos de los performances mas notables de su
generaci6n. Entre elias destaca Ia primera acci6n sonora, Aire fresco molestado porun
hwJcan, durante Ia apertura de Ia e).posicion Suave y fresco (La Casona, 1987).
47 E: tJ formd colectiva de autoayuda creada en 1970 c011 cl objetivo de permitir a lo-;
tr ajadores constru ir sus viviendas, recibi6 un nuevo impulso a mediados de los ochenta.
Sill embargo, el amauterismo de los integrantes determine Ia pesima caliclad de las
2 ~ic ac ion e : \' pronto el modcln fue minado par Ia holgazaneria, Ia corrupci6n o h
i::H venciun del Es taclo, que podia disponer de lasvi\'iendas arbitrariamente.
48 /lrtiJf Cuenca, entrevista con el au tor, fv! iami, enero de 2008.
49 A unso Mateo, entrevista con el autor. Miami, diciembre de 2007.
50 Como represalia de las autoriclades par Ia ace ion de Angel Dele ado, Iadirectora del Centro
r 1ra el Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales. Beatriz Aul et fue despedida
51 G: ~x is Novoa, "La Consagrac i6n de Ia Jocledera "
52 C!•JI History lntervim·: with Ruben Torres Llorra, Mi c~mi, Januar·1 31 , 1998. Smithsonian
_
:, .hives of Ameri can Art. DispnniiJIP en linea en http/ IV'>\ \\•.aaa.si. du 'collecti ons'
., ll, ;< ' orie ~ ltrans cr i~ :: 1 trg ro• _T'1t•n
53 , -1'1Capote. el'trt' ,:. :J ":1•"' ;!· ·;e-. Lii H3b""''l, 2n•J0
54 ' ·.a Bru!]u m, IIJ1d.
55 r· ·Jabinete clu O:clo;\rnfll " " •:;u( 1 Esr a•. ,,l i\!Jiiih::u!t;, c 1 Ullil o:cu,il dP crin;cn c1
'~11, rrn r:o t:l n~J o ~ a fl(l;:nalc ·;l r! ~~~ ·~d rst i~~l :lcl ni.:r ~' 1/ r Es;K~C"·1 . 1p'u! . ~'it· r · f.' '1 '' ··s
11 1
('

·, ao (H0Ianda F.Hrloc:on Pri:w Clii'IS, 70061.

56 _.· obras se rcf ieren !Ps perfnrnFillr:Ps El a;Jo dt' Ia sog; (1983~ 19B4). deL111da ~. lontai'O·
1- '1( hing H;ieli, en el que pPnnanc:cieronatado, por UIFI so,1a a lil cintura dw ant8 un arn
; :Jo l pt:rfulfllilllCe til qnc idor'ni, ,:,IJrdliiL·v:c ,n tic:re ~;:. hiO,ILI8 clelm.!uLII SL; cll~ tcrl d o:;

57 ~ 1 :1 r·t) B.H..cht r1 in.per.J . ~Ll u: cJr.~: r .. >·1i.;~ a e 1El J:, "ta p.',i!'(t!.- !200m. Oir'l· ~ fl·."'
n r<>JiiZii,lo l eiria: acr ones re lt~ c ionadas ron su exper:r ncia degurrra comsJ soldatlo del
" : ·ci n cub:mo enl\ngnh P,1: .. u p 11tc. Ariel Ormco e\ miis 1ntimo y a menudo elude a
· 1:. relacioncs famlliares. Despues de que 3u madre muri era, recorri(, ocho elias ~egu i d~ s
·! lloyecto desde el r.ementerio hastJ su casa, rargando una reproducci6n en plomo de Ia
~ Jlsa que usabii sumaclre para ir de compra s(Ejercicio rle peso. 2003! Ver Hector Anton
'.Jstillo. "Aiares y desapariciones de Ar'el Orozco." 18 de agosto de 2007. Disponible en
· ~1e a en v'iww.criticarte.com
58 r'uneiki'S Villalonga, "La utopia devivir JUntos len estos tiernpos)." Ailling Time. catalogo
'le exposici6n (New York Exit Art, 2007~2008)
59 Para Ia apertura de Ia rxposici6n Killing Time en Exit A1 t (Nue ra York, 12 de mayo, 2007).
.~ uvua inv1tu aunnnitarl01 do l'irlcl L.astJO, qui en so cunvi1tiu en ei lli!!;spet! d,: /1, ,Jt. U1:
J ·:ideo del performance estii disponillle en www.youtube.com
 El cuerpo usado como instrumento de expresi6n: Arte de acci6n en Republica Dominicana
Sayuri Guzman
" ... el arte es una experiencia viva, noes un objeto colgado en Ia pared. El arte
debe ffsicamente movernos, sacudirnos, excitarnos ... es el cuerpo, con todos sus
sentidos alertas y expectantes, Ia unico perdurable de su acci6n debe quedar
tranquilamente en Ia memoria .. "
- Geo Ripley
Reptiblica Dominicana es un pafs en donde lo perfomatico es cotidiano, lo vemos
palpitar en las calles. El dominicano tiene un alto grado de inventiva, una
capacidad para refrse de sus males y expresar ideas en imagenes Es asf como
acciones "no artfsticas" llegan a parecernos performances Y no hablamos
solamente del sincretismo cultural, del Gaga dominicano, ni de ritos religiosos;
hablamos de aetas simb61icos con una gran carga polftica y social. 1 En este
sentido, me perm ito sefialar solo dos de estos casas. Durante los XIV Juegos
Panamericanos de 2003, los residentes del barrio Cristo Rey en Santo Domingo,
con Ia iniciativa del Padre Rogelio,Z intervinieron las calles con Ia Antorcha del
hambre, en Ia que un hombre famelico, vestido con traje de atleta, sostenfa una
antorcha en sus manos seguido de una multitud que reclamaba mejores
condiciones de vida. En otra acci6n. el 4 de agosto de 2006 Angel Patricio Sosa
Gonzalez3sali6 desde Dajab6n a pie, con una cruz a cuestas, hacia el Palacio
Nacional, que se encuentra a 365 kil6metros de distancia. Conocido por el pueblo
simplemente como El Hombre de Ia Cruz, exigi6 arreglos en carreteras y el
mejoramiento de servicios basicos para su comunidad.
Sin embargo, Ia acci6n artfstica obedece aotra estetica y lectura. Debo aclarar que
en Ia Republica Dominicana no existe un dogmatismo en el arte. Unpin tor podrfa ser
manana un escultor; un instalador podrfa ser un ceramista, o viceversa. Par esta
raz6n es entendible que los artistas dominicanos, principal mente los de vanguardia,
comenzaran a utilizar el cuerpo como media de expresi6n
El performance surgi6 simu ltaneamente en varias partes del mundo, atend iendo
a problematicas y esteticas distintas. Por un lado, Ia Europa en media de Ia post-
guerra. en donde predominaron lo dramatico, lo masoquista y el misticismo, con
una marcada provocaci6n religiosa; par otro, los Estados Unidos, cuyas obras
carecieron de Ia mftico-religioso y se enmarcaron en el minirna lismo conceptual.
accioncs de Ia vida cotid iana y un particu lar interes por lo social yfeminista.
En Latinoamerica. el performanceposeecaracterfsticas propias, con cl trasfondo do
pueblos sometidos a dictacl~1ras ferreas -entrantes o salientes-. intervenciones
mili tares. golpes cle estado, inestabilidacl social. etc. Enla decacla de los sesenta,
Ia Republica Duminicana se encuntraba en un estado cleexpcctat1va. En1961, era
ajusticiado Rafael Leonidas TruJillo. de esta manera poniendose fin a Ia clictadura.
pero ya para 1963 era derrocado en un golpe de estado el Prof Juan Bosch, dando
paso a Ia cruenta guerracivil de 1965. Durante estetiempo, Maximo Aviles Blanda.
Ramon Ovi edo. Ada Balcacer, Jose Cestero y Silvana Lora formaron el Frente
Cultu1 al Abril 1965. EstG.; artistas asumieron una posicion politico-social crit1ca;
tomaron sabanas, cartones o cualquier material sabre el que pintaban y creaban
graffitis de consignaspidicJ-,clo cl retorno a Ia constitucionalidad. Las pegaron por
todo el Distrito Nacional.
Estas acciones vinieron a reforzar loque ya Silva no Lora estaba realizando con el
Grupo Arte y Li beraci6n, un colectivo fund ado en 1962. El grupo hac fa intervenciones
ca llejeras utilizando musica, poesia y pintura en vivo Como artista de vanguardia
muy cercano al Arte Poveray al Nuevo Realismo, Ia obra de Lora era una de lucha
comprometida con causas sociales, en Ia que apostaba por el ejercicio de la s
ideologfas. Sus acciones podrfan considerarse como "acciones artfstico-sociales",
como en su momenta Clemente Paclin 1 llamara las suyas Lora no solo contribuyo
desde su propia obra a estas causa s, sino que a su vez orgoniz6 actividades que
290
sirvieron para democratizar Ia apreciaci6n y el desarrollo del arte. Este es el caso
de Ia Bienal Marginal, realizada en el Barrio Santa Barbara de Santo Domingo
En su performance La ruta de Hatuey(ca 1975). realiz6 el recorrido par mar en un •
cayucos hasta Cuba, tal como lo hiciera el cacique al sublevarse contra los
espanoles En 1992, en ocasi6n del Quinto Centenario del Descubrimi ento de
America, Lora volvi6 a subirse al cayuco y esta vez desde el rfo Ozama, vestido
como aborigen, Ianzo flechas hacia donde se celebraban los aetas conmemorativos,
en particular Ia inauguraci6n del Faro a Colon. Para Silvana Lora el aborigen
1
representaba los desplazados y abusados par fuerzas de poder
Muy distinta es Ia manera en que el artista Geo Ripley ha abordado Ia cultura
1
indfgena y negra, haciendolo desde un punta de vista antropol6gico, con altares
y rituales simb61icos en performances, happenings e instalaciones. AI igual que ]
otros artistas de Ia epoca, Ia gran parte de su obra performatica fue realizacla en
el extranjero Brasil. Nueva York, Puerto Rico, Franc ia. ltalia y Venezuela. Una de
sus acciones en el pafs fue Paloma degollada, en Ia que el artista hizo un corte
limpio semicircular sabre un papel en blanco, dandole Ia forma del cuello de una
l
paloma con Ia navaja Luego present6 el papel quebrada al publico En 1979,
durante Ia celebraci6n del 50 Aniversario del Museum of Modern Art de Nueva
York, present6 Pijao,&un video-performance real izado en Colombia, por lo tantofuc I
el primer artista dominicano en exponer en esta instituci6n. En 1987, con su obra
Hombre pintando de raja, Ripley escandaliz6 en Ia XIX Bienal de Sao Paulo, al
llegar a Ia misma sabre un caballo blanco, semidesnudo y con el cuerpo pi ntado
de rojo El artista gui6 al publico fuera del museo para presenciar en Ia expla nada
del rnismo un ritual al com pas de los tambores y alrededor de una fogata En 1989
produjo El ancestro con el cuerpo pintado de raja, un performance que mostru en 1
Paris, Bona, Jarash y Londres yque fue considerado como Ia expresi6n subversiva
del Caribe. Ripley forma parte del Grupo Abanico· y de Los Pluralistas." junto <J
otro artista del performance, Orlando Meniccucci. ]
En1968, Menicucci realiz6 en las instalaciones cle Ia Universidad Cat61ica Madre
y Maestra una presentaci6n que todos elogiaron como un mon61ogo La acci6n, en
Ia que prevalecfa Ia improvisaci6n, consisti6 en quitarse Ia ropa mientras hablaba
sabre su vida y atravesaba un marco vacfo que se encontraba en el escenarin.
Menicucci entendfa que no habfa reali7ado un mon61ogo, sino algo mas AI viaiar
a Mexico. entr6 en contacto con el performance, haci enda en su est J 1i
intervencione<; performaticas, incluso en televis irin, como partedel Gruro Su11 .. ·
Sin embargo, su proclucci6n en neptiiJiir.a Dominicana. a pesar cle ser prolffir:d
(rea!iz6 eventos en Santiago, su ciudaclnatal, y luego forma parte clel Cole.:l: ~.
Chocolatero, de Puerto Plata) ha mantcnido Ia iclea de Ia presencia efimera. ~' , 1
preocuparse por Ia documentaci6n fflmica o foto grafica de su trabaJO Por e ; ,
raz6n solo conocemos sus acciones mediante Ia transmisi6n oral de lo~ J
espectadores que tuvieron el privilegio de veri as
Otra artistade vanguardia hasido Soucy de Pellerano, llamada "La Maqui notrona
por Ia creacion cle un penetrable ensamblado con placas de acero y otr,,,
materiales rEciclados al que 11Jm6 Aiaqumottoum Pell crano cre6 maq u in n~: ·.
interactuaba con elias en acciones en domle evidenciaba no solo !a situaci6n ds
Ia muJer maltratada, sino tambienla de una sociedad maquinizada Abrfa y cerra bd
las puertas de estos aparatos, los encenclfa, les transmitfa energfa con un bast6n,
los utilizaba de referencia para cada acci6n realizacla A veces se colocaba dentro
de elias durante horas y esperaba pacientemente Ia llegada del visitante. Perellano
es aun hoy docente de Ia Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes y desde su catedra
habla con sus alum nos sabre el performance y sus posibilidades plasticas. Sigue
realizando acciones en las que participan sus estudiantes.
Durante Ia decada de los ochenta Yi-Yoh Robles comenz6 a realizar acciones que
podrfamos definir como instalo-performance, ya que por lo general se col ocaba
dentro de sus ambientes e interactuaba con el espectador desde esa posicion de
"Dios de Ia tierra " Sus instalaciones no segulan un patron definido, pero
abordaron el tema de lo ludico, de Ia tierra, de lo magico. Robles manejaba un
concepto duracional del performance y se mantenla, en ocasiones de manera
estatica, por horas, atavrado con trajes de fantasia o desnudo. En esa epoca,
tambien form6 parte del grupo espana I Caos 10 y present6 acciones que irrumplan
en el espacio publico En 1985, por ejemplo, el artista salt6 desde el puente Juan
Pablo Duarte al rio Ozama, provocando que el transito se detuviera pues los
conductores crefan que habla ocurrido un suicidio.
Durante lasbienales enla Galerfa de Arte Moderno (actual mente Museo de Arte
Moderno),n se colocaba una tarima donde se realizaban performances. Estas
acciones eran por lo demas un espectaculo que servia para "entretener" al publico
asistente yen gran parte estaban muy ligadas al teatro, Ia poesia y Ia danza.
Podemosmencionar en este senti do a Marylin Gallardo, quien ha realizado danzas
rituales afro-antillanas, en las que predomina Ia improvisaci6n. Gallardo deJa al
espectador perplejo, lo bombardea con mensajes, manteniendolo atento a cada
uno de sus movimientos, enfrentandolo a Ia publicidad polltica, a Ia critica social
0 al fol klore africa no, segtln sea Ia indole de su danza-performance.
Par otro Iado, Ia diaspora dominicana esta representada par artistas pioneros como
Dionys Figueroa 12 y figuras mas contemporaneas Charo Oquet, 13 Nicolas Dumit
Estevez, ~ Josefina Baez,l entre otros. Estos artistas abordan los temas de Ia
migraci6n, el sincretismo, el folklore, Ia musica, Ia identidad, Ia gastronomia y Ia
idiosincrasia del dominicano.
Apartir del ano 2000, el performance tom6 una fuerza nunca antes vista en Ia is la
con Ia proliferaci6n de colectivos, eventos y talleres Entre ellos se encuentran los
colectivos La Vaina y Chocolatero, los encuentros Calida lnvierno, Chocopop,
Acciones de Otofio, Remapping Reformulando el mapa (Nue va Cartograffa del
Caribe), el Festivallnternacional de Performance; los proyectos Salvavidas para
Sabana de Ia Mar, 1" La Ruta de Ia performance, AI Limite y Noche de performance.
Asimismo, destaca el Diplomado en Estudios de Performance, coordinado por MaJa
Hor e impartido en FLACSO. Entre los artistas de mayor interes estan David Perez
(conocido comokarmadavis), Jochi Munoz. Carlos Ortiz. Caryana Castillo, Lina Aybar,
Polibio Oiaz, Fermin Ceballos, Miguel Ramirez. Pascal Mecarriello y El iu Almonte.
quienes''ienen realizando acciones tanto nacional como internacionalmentw
Todo movi rn iento artfstico cumple un ciclo vital una pre-historia, una historia,
una decadencia y un renacim iento El performance como lenguaje artistico tiene
tambien u historiograffa y en Ia Republr ca Dominicana encontramos unos
antecedentes en artistas y movimientos. unos pi oneros, algunos mitos y
podrlamos decir que un final. tras el cual parece resu rgir de sus cenizas. Estamos
en presencia de un renovaclo interes de los artistas dominicanos por usar el
cuerpo ramo media de expresi 6n.
Notadr l editor El GarJa dominirano es una cr>lcbrilcirirJ r_>munil! b'h' ida trl <I;Jd'JI.: al rai<
via H1iti que consiste enprocesiones de tipu co .. r·a ~ sa. cr': r'tJ<:cr·<',' ba·ra. ' ,r, < El des fi1c
reco ~re !Js pueblos fronteri ms para atraer personas de diferente origen Posee una ra iz
religio<.a relacionada con el Vodun. por lo que se dcdica a los luases y tiene Iugar durante
ocerca de Ia Semana Santa.
PadreRogelio Cruz. Parroco de Ia Parroquia de Cr1sto Rey, quien a ra izde Ia 1nte1venci6n
urbana deIa Antorcha del hambre fue trasladado de parroquia Actual mente se encuentra
en Villa Riva, Republ ica Dominicana.
Hombre comunitario, res idente enel paraJe Los Miches. Oajab6n, en Ia frontera con Ha iti.
lnicirJ:us cmninatas para e irpr ill gobierno del Presiclcnte Leone! Fernandezejecutar las
obras 'lUe prometi6 el dia 2 de febrero del <H1o 2005 cuanclo vi sitara Ia frontera.
Clemente Pad in, artista uruguayo Poeta experimental. performer, videista, networker, muy
comprometido con las causas sociales. Fue apresado durante Ia dictadura militar de su
pais par sus trabajos criticos.
Nota del editor El cayuco es un tipo de canoa pequeiia tipicamente utilizaba par los
aborigenes para sus incursiones en el mar En Ia acci6n, Lora hizo construir un cayuco
empleando el metoda tradicional de tall a de un arbol.
6 Nota del editor: Pijao es el nombre de una etnia indigena de las alturas sureiias de
Colombia. Segun comenta Geo Ripley, estos grupos nunca fueron vencidos par los
colonizadores espaiioles y el Rey Carlos I pact6 con elias otorgandoles Ia propiedad de
sus tierras. El trabajo de Ripley llamaba Ia atenci6n sabre Ia situaci6n precaria de ese
pueblo. asediado par Ia desertificaci6n.
Proyecto de cooperaci6n y simbiosis de concepciones artisticas, una autentica fusion de
culturas y actitudes entre artistas de losaiios setenta yochenta, cuyo fundador fue Rufino
"Rufo" de Mingo
Apareci6 el22 de febrero de 1974 cuando Manuel Rueda dicta, en Ia Biblioteca Nacional
de Santo Domingo, una extensa conferencia titulada "Clave para una poesia plural", en Ia
que proponia una revision total a Ia poesia hueca, insustancial y ensangrentada que
estaban escribiendo los poetas dominicanos en ese momenta, fruto del asfixiante clima
politico imperante en el pais a raizde Ia Guerra Civil de abril de 1965. Este grupo realiz6
varias intervenciones.
El Grupo Suma se forma en 1976, en Ia Academia de San Carlos. Mexico. derivado del
Taller de Experimentaci6n Visual y Pintura Mural. Uno de sus objetivos fue llevar el arte a
Ia calle, ponerlo en contacto con los que no tienen acceso a las galerias. pero a Ia vez,
convertir al hombre comun en parte de Ia obra.
10 Fundado tambien par el artista espana! Rufo de Mingo, este grupo de artistas se
au todenomin6 Caos. como una reacci6n a las modas y a Ia mania clasificatoria de los
criticos
11 Nota del editor La Bienal comenz6 en 1942 y, segun Marianne de Tolentino, el performance
se incluy6 como categoria "libre" desde 1979, junto con otras mas tradicionales como
escultura. pintura y dibuJO. Vea su ensayo "EI Arte Actual en Ia Republica Oominicana,"
Caribe Insular Exclusion, Fragmentaci6n y Parafso (Museo Extreme no e lberoamericano
de Arte Contemporiineo y Casa de America. Madrid, 19981. 287.
12 En 1980, Figueroa hizo acciones conceptuales en San Juan. Puerto Rico. mientras vivia y
estudiaba alii.
13 Cliaro Oquet vive y trabaja en Miami . Es una artista que ha expuesto internacionalmente,
adem?.s de ser activi sla y fundadora-directora de Edge Zones. espaciode arte no lucrat1vo
Gn Ia barriaJa miamiense de Wynwood.
14 NiLJ!!;s Oum1t Estevez v1ve y lrclbaja en Nueva York. Recientemen te recibi6 becas de
klichael Richards Fund de Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Puffin Foundation. Tide'
Foundation. Center for Book Arts. Franklin Furnace. Yaddo y de IVIacDowell Colony.
15 Josefina B,iez es actriz. esmtora. educadora 'I direc tora. Cre6 y dinge desde 1986
Latinarte 1Ay Ombe Theatre.
16 Pr~y cc tn renlizado por Iaartista dominicana rPsidente en Nuevn York, Schere1ade Garcia.
 Performance y arte acci6n en Centroamerica, 1960-2000: Una opci6n polftica y estetica
Virginia Perez-Ratton
Escribir sabre los acontecimientos en el mundo del arte en Centroamerica entre
1960 y pri ncipia de los aiios 90 es diffcil en sf. El asunto se complica aun mas si
nos referimos a las obras de performance o accion, ya que Ia falta de
documentacion es mayor en comparacion a Ia situacion general de las artes
visua les. Este fue uno de los periodos mas conflictivos en nuestra historia
reciente y marco a Ia region de manera indeleble luchas politicas, rebeliones y
contrarrevoluciones, migraciones masivas y un proceso de paz que ha sido
cuestionado hasta nuestros dfas En este contexto, las pocas acciones y
performances que se realizaron ni siquiera fueron considerados arte yexisten solo
en Ia memoria de quienes las presenciaron o que las conocieron de ofdas. En Ia
redaccion de este ensayo, quiero reconocer Ia valiosa ayuda de mis colegas en Ia
reg ion, que me proporcionaron informacion a partir de su experiencia personal o
recolectada en sus respectivos contextosi lntentare, a partir de vari as fuentes,
presentar una vision relativamente incompleta de las iniciativas que de alguna
manera prepararon el camino para lo que sucede a principios del siglo XXI
Entre los primeros cam bios que se die ron con los anos sesenta en el campo de las
artes visuales en esta region se encontro Ia reevaluacion de las areas urbanas
tradicionales como espacios de arte. En marzo de 1961, cuatro jovenes pintores
panamenos (Antonio Alvarado, Mario Calvit, Alberto Dutary, Alfredo Sinclair)
presentaron una exhibicion en el area historica de Santo Domingo, justamente
donde se ergu fa el Area Chato/ como una man erade recuperar las ruinas ydedicar
ese espacio para propositos culturales Este tipo de actividad, que no podrfa
clasificarse como una ace ion, y sf como una exposicion ala ire libre, fue, en Ia epoca,
una declaracion artistica que habrfa de liberar las viejas estructuras artisticas y de
hecho tuvo un perfil activista. Un aiio antes, en Costa Rica, Juan Luis Rodriguez
considerado el primer artista en el pais en cuestionar los principios modernos y
abrir el camino hacia practicas contemporaneas orientadas a las relaciones entre
el arte y Ia vida, organizo un evento colectivo similar en un parque de Ia ciudad.
Habra carteles de carton con poesfa escrita; mascaras de bejuco-hechas par uno
de los organizadores cuyo ta ller servia de sede para el grupo- se exhibieron al
lado de pinturas y hubo discusiones abiertas en el parque sabre las obras en
exhibicion. El evento fue considerado par loscrfticos como una nueva estrategia par
parte de estos artistas, que "se aproximaban a Ia gente y encontraban respeto y
admiracion " j Poco despues, Rodriguezse mudo a Francia donde paso dace anos.
basta su regreso a Costa Rica a principios de los anos setenta. Durante suestadfa
e11 Europa, d6nde era conocido como Rodriguez Sibaja, experiment6 con arte
ecol6gico al tiempo que desarrol laba su pi ntura "materica" sabre 111adera y otros
medias no tradicionales F11e invitado a 'arias ediciones de Ia Biennale de Paris y,
como muchos otros artistas internacionales, participo en Ia politica con sus colegas
franceses. Par este motivo fue e pu lsado de Francia en mayo de 1968, huyo a
Bruselas, y a traves de una red de artistas solidarios fue recibido par Marcel
Broodthaers, a quien no canada. Pas6 los siguientes seis meses en casa de
Broodthaers. conoci6 a muchos de los artistas de su cfrculo y particip6 en
actividades ligadas a su trabajo En el invierno de 1968, durante un encuentro en
Amberes con Joseph Beuys y un grupo de artistas que se encontraban 1esidiendo
ilegalmente en Belgica, construyeron juntos barricadas de hielo en Ia calle que
impidieron queIa policia entrara en el cafe donde estaban reunidos Tomaron como
referencia los acontecimientos de mayo en Paris · Rodriguezvolvi6 a esta ciudad
en diciembre de ese aiio y continuo con su activismo politico. en el cual influy6
notablemente su encuentro con Beuys Mucha de su trabajo durante Ia segunda
parte de su estadfa en Europa tambien se via marcado par Ia revuelta estudiantil
de 1968, y su memorable pieza de acci6n, El combate fue seleccionada para Ia VI
Biennale de Paris de 1969 Philippe Bouvard escribi6 en Le F1garo
En una medii! penumbra. el ilrtista co locil sillas hechas de hicfo rojo
brillante sobre una plataforma Mientras un grupo golpea tambores ba)o
un esquema de luces inteligente, los altavoces reproducen entrevistas de
antiguos boxeadores y el ruido de un publico escanda loso, grabado en un
palacio deportivo Poco a poco, bajo el efectodel calor, las sillas comienzan
a derretirse, y finalmente se reducen a grandes charcos sanguinolentos
en una plataforma blanca. Diab61icamente instructivo.s
Rodriguez Sibaja volvi6 a Costa Rica en 1972 y produjo poco despues de esa fecha
pero se volvi61a figura mas importante en Ia escuela de arte para los estudiante~
mas jovenes. Probablemente sea uno de los artistas mas influyentes para Ia
generacion que comenzo su trabajo artfstico en los ochenta. Su influencia, siempre
controversia l, lo era mas en relaci6n con Ia actitud del artista en Ia sociedad que
con Ia obra en sf. Los Museos del Banco Central de Costa Rica organizaron una
exposicionretrospectiva alrededor de El combate en 1995, para Ia cual se publico
un amplio catalogo En 1996, en Ia XXIII Bienal de Sao Paulo, Rodriguez construyo
otra pieza de hielo en el jardfn afuera de un edificio de Niemeyer Era una
plataforma y una piramide de bloques de hielo blancos con un signa de
interrogacion negro y rojo encima. Dentro de las galerfas de Ia Bienal, escribi6
sus poemas con grafito en pedazos de papel tosco hecho a mano y los fijo a las
paredes Conocido en San Josecomo "Juan Diablo" hoy en dfa mantiene un· vida
privada, dedicada a sf mismo y su familia, pero para muchos artistas aun
representa un momenta de cambia en la historia del arte en Costa Rica.
Vale Ia pena mencionar dos acciones tempranas de Luiz Dfaz, un artista quegan6
un prem ia en Ia Primera Bional Centroamericana en San Jose, Costa Rica, ·~ Ia VII
Bienal de Sao Paulo, ambas en1971.1nvitado a representar asu pais en Ia secci6n
de grabados de Ia Biennale di Venezia de 1972, us6 las alcantarillas de hierro
fund ido del sistema de Ia ciudad como matriz, pegando un pedazo de carton a las
alcantarillas de Ia Calle Once y Ia Avenida Seis de Ia Zona Uno en Ia ciudad de
Guatemala. Durante tres horas, los caches rod aron por encima de las alcantarillas
de metal, marcando Ia imagen en el carton, y el artista produjo una seri e de
grabados decuatro par seis pies, que titulo Grabados aIa rueda. Supuestamente,
Jillya Kaplan, reportando desde Artspace, coment6 que en Ia epoca, Luis Dfaz, no
teniendo una imprenta apropiada, decidio usar este metoda como alternativa al
proceso de impresi6n ' Sin embargo, Ia pi eza tambi en explora una nueva
conciencia del contexto urbana y una estetica distinta. creada por los elementos
materiales de Ia ciudad. Durante esta epoca Ia mayor parte de Centroamericaer·
relativamente rural, y par esta raz6n el arte y Ia iclentidad estaban ligado: , Ia
traclici6n y Ia etnico. Eventos ligado~ a Ia ciurlacl. asus hahitante y al ritmo u, r"r'j
eran ca i incxistentes. El hecho c)<) queLuis Diaztambien es arquitecto yqL,L i· bia
ya disefiado varios edi ficios conociclos en Ia ciudad de Guatemala en In" ?i:·_ · i
setenta quiza ayude a explicar su noci6n del arte y sus procesos, que Rr-
revolucionarios para su epoca.
I
A finales de los aiios setenta, Antonio Alvarado. uno de los artistas panamefioso ~"
habfaorganizado en 1960 Iaexposici6n ala ire libre en el Arco Chato, fue invita.i. 11
exponer en Mexico Mostr6 una serie de marcos vacfos y explicaba al publico Ia J
obras que no poclfan scr vistas Parece ser que repitiu esta acci6n en Pan11r "- l
En 1981, en Ia escuela de arte de Ia Universiclad N~cional Aut6noma de ~Jl e ( cr
(UNArYl), fue lllvitado a Ci e<H un proyecto virtua l para Ia muestra Proyer.tu5 /'] J
realizados. : ypresent6. en colaboraci6n con el artista Eduardo Perez, Ia propuestJ
de un Canal de Panama atraves de los Estados Unidos. Esta intervencion conceptua'
consistfa en una "gran zanja" en el territorio norteamericano Otra panamena que
busc6 alternativas al espacio convencional de exposiciones fue Alicia Vitteri . E1r
l
1975, coloc6 veinte de sus grabados en veinte autobuses de Ia ciudad durante un mcs
entero con Ia intenci6n de llevar el arte a las calles. Despues de Ia exposici6n, los
grabados(ueron devueltos aIa artista. En 1984, paraIa apertura de Ia exposicion Uc
carnavales y funerales, en el Museo de Arte Contemporc\neo de Panilrna. cre6 111 <
pieza que consisti6 en una acci6n en colaboraci6n con el publico pinto unmu1a1
grande en Ia pared del museo que mostraba a gente en funerales y carnava l e~ . !~ :
J
_I
publico que asistio fue incorporado al mural a !raves de Ia iluminacion. Un video
documento esta interaccion, he incluyo una banda sonora grabada en zonas
comerciales de Ia ciudad.
Primeros performers o artista s de acci6n
Margarita Azurd ia (bajo el pseudonimo temporal de Margot Fanjul). fue Ia primera
artista centroamericana en participar en un evento internacional con un
performance individual. En 1970, presento Favor quftarse los zapatos en Ia II Bienal
Coltejer en Medellin, Colombia. Esta pieza consistia en pedirle al publico que se
quitara los zapatos y entrara en una construccion cavernosa de madera con un
suelo cubierto de arena. el cual, al contacto con los pies descalzos, provocaba una
experiencia sensorial que invitaba al publico a comunicarse con Ia tierra. Azurdia
es una artista innovadora en muchos aspectos: durante muchos afios trabaj o con
mujeres. produciendo performances durante Ia pear epoca de Ia contrarrevolucion
nGuatemala, ninguna de las cuales fue documentada. Su interes en las energias
nlanetarias era una caracteristica recurrente en muchas de sus obras posteriores,
i~nto como poeta, pintora y escultora . asi como en las danzas rituales y happenings
ouedesarrollo alrededor de los anos ochenta hasta el final de su vida en 1998. De
;.J primer performance en 1970, todo lo que queda es una imagen oscura y borrosa
deIa artista, dificil de distinguir, iluminada solo por una pequefia luz. Sin embargo,
r neste even to Azurdia presento tambien una serie de esculturas de manna I blanco
··nsambladas con tornillos de modo que el publico podia rotar los elementos para
interactuar con las piezas. Sus propuestas llamaron mucho Ia atencion, y su
presencia trascendio a su propia obra. La Bienal habia invitado a Luis Diaz, que no
rodia via jar aColombia por motivos financieros. asi que preparo una pieza titulada
Siete radiogramas con instrucciones. Esta fue concebida en colaboracion con otro
arquitecto guatemalteco, Cesi Novella, y consistio en enviar a los organizadores
L:na serie de telegramas con instrucciones muy simples a ser ejecutadas
cubra caja tela blanca stop suspenda cable techo nudos cada metro fin
tocandose centro stop espere siguientes instrucciones stop
Lu is Diaz recuerda que los organizadores no sabian como proceder, pero Margot
Fdnjul ayudo a que las instrucciones fueran colocadas en un Iugar visible de su
\ .; a de performance. y asi permitio que hubiera una amplia discusi6n sabre el
· ' 'J de obra que Diaz y Novella proponian.
[n aiios posteriores, "Margarita rita rica Dinamita" (como ella preferia llamarse a
r .rtir de uno de sus Iibras de poesial organiz6 talleres de danza. Esta p1eza estuvo
· 'acionada con Ia escuelas norteamericanas de danza moclerna. las cuales
v ocuraron trabajar el cuerpo de forma profunda y significativa Azurdia hizo
r'esentaciones sola oen grupo en parques yotros espacios publicos. En1974, eligio
! ,1 campo abierto como espacio para presentar una de sus mas importantes obras
e:1grupo, Homenaje a Guatemala, una serie de esculturas de madera policromadas
i, cpiradas en Ia cultura popular y los mitos de su pais ' en su imaginariu pe1 son a!.
Eote fue un acto de rebelion revolucionario, el cual no solo atentaba contra del
"- Dacia de Ia galeria, sino que favorecia Ia naturaleza La artista rnantuvo est a
,, titud a lo largo de su vida, Ia cualle valio reputacion de locura. Sin embargo, para
los artistas guatemaltecos que Ia conocieron oque comenzaron su practica artistica
antes de los a11os noventa, ella fue una referencia importante (Ia generaci6n mas
jcmn casi no Ia conoce 1Recientemente se han realizado esfuer10s para reconocer
~u relevancia y algunas de sus esculturas han sido restauradas y expuestas :'
El contexto centroamericano entre 1960 y finales de los ochenta, junto a Ia
erlucacionartistica que reinaba enla epoca, no prepar6 a los artistas rara prod11cir
acciones o performances en esa epoca. Mucha de lo que tuvo Iugar hasta finales
Lielos ochenta fue realizado por artistas que pod ian viaj31, ya sea para presentarse
en contextos internacionales o para realizar sus estudios de arte. El panameno
Manuel Mantilla es Ia excepcion. ya que su trabajo casi no ha trascendido los
limites de su ciudad natal de David, en Ia lejana provincia de Chiriqui, cerca de Ia
frontera con Costa Rica. En Metamorbosis, 1976, se encerro con un perro en un
espacio muy pequeno lleno de objetos y arte, sin comida, y con Ia intencion de
entender Ia percepcion del espacio y Ia manera en que uno se relaciona con sus
limitaciones. El publico podia observar al artista y al perro en el espacio cerrado
Esta obra se puede relacionar con una accion de Beuys en 1974 en Nueva York, en
Ia cual el artista compartio un espacio con un coyote por tres dias.9 Sin embargo,
al parecer que el acto de Mantilla tenia mas que ver con Ia experiencia ffsica y
mental de compartir un espacio limitado con elementos opuestos (un animal vivo
y una acumulacion de objetos artfsticos). que con las relaciones entre Ia naturaleza
y Ia tecnologia En todo caso, Mantilla fue desdenado porIa comunidad local y su
trabajo fue descartado como "otra locura mas de los artistas de Chiriqui"
Este tipo de actitud era comun en toda Ia region ymuchas de las primeras acciones
o performances de artistas locales se presentaron en el extranjero. Algunas fueron
presentadas nuevamente con revisiones para el contexto local. Las acciones que
tuvieron Iugar en el area no solo han sido pobremente documentadas, sino que
tambienlas historias y fechas son confusas ycontradictorias. El contacto con artistas,
sin embargo, ha proporcionado algunos datos sabre estas primeras acciones
Otto Apuy estudio por varios anos en Barcelona yparticipo en varias acciones afines
de los anos setenta. Una de el ias. realizada en Ia Galeria Ciento en 1979 se baso en
Ia viscosidad de Ia pintura, pero acarreaba un fuerte sentimiento de luto el artista
vertio una espesa yoleosa pintura negra en una estructura de palos de madera y tela
al ritmo del Adagio de Albinoni, hasta que Ia pintura llego al pi soy formo un charco
negro A su regreso a Costa Rica, Apuy presento en el Monumento Nacional una
version de esta pieza en 1986 que estaba ligada aIa historia politica local fndice de
resbalosidad El monumento, ubicado en el centro de un parque cerca del Congreso
costarricense, conmemora Ia campana de 1856 contra William Walker y su ejercito
de filibusteros.·oApuy realizo esta accion en el aniversario de Ia creacion de Ia
bandera de Costa Rica. El artista construyo un andamio de cinco metros para
sostener varios paneles inclinados sabre los cuales derramo litros de pintura raja.
blanca y azul. pero dejando que Ia pintura raja, que simboliza Ia sangre, llegara sola
al final de Ia corriente. En 1985, en el poblado de David, de clima caliente, Mantilla
reo liz6 El espacio ingelante Un nino pequef\o vestido de payaso estaba sentado
clentro de un refrigerador industrial con Ia puerta abierta durante varias horas.
rnientras que Iuera del refrigerador sus padres y artistas hablaban de asuntos o en
lenguas queelnif\o no podia entender. AI contra star las temperaturas entre los dos
espacios yconfrontar alniiio y los otros personajes. con notaba el estar en otro Iugar.
Ratil Quintanilla ha descrito una acci6n de tu Iugar en 1987, enla Galeria /\SCT en
Managua. durante Ia apertura de una e posicion de RATs: 11
Una bailarina profesional fue contratada para hacer una presentacion
acompaiiada por un saxofon, un bajo y una trompeta. colocados en las
esquinas de Ia galerfa. (La bailarina original no se present6, asi que
tuvimos que contratar a otra que no habfa ensayado I Ejecuto una danza
ritual entre el publico por cerca de diez minutos, y despues se aproxirn6 a
un cuadro mio titulado Toma esta daga, saco un cuchillo escondido en una
maceta y apuiialo el cuadro tres veces al compas de Ia musica Despues
se volteo de cara al publico y las luces se apagaron (jEsta vez salio mejor
que Ia primera 11.1,
Ouintanillcl tambien ha hccho rcferencia a una e.<Lentrica intervenci6n rea lizada
en otra inauguracion par Juan Bautista Juarez, quien saltando de un lado a otro,
realizo una especie de danza ritual sosteniendo con una cuerda una balsa de arena
 perforada que derramaba mientras bailaba. AI final, rompi61a balsa completamente
y arroj6 arena al publico. Esta pieza se present6 en Ia Galerla Xavier Kant6n de
Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales de Managua, en Ia exposici6n colectiva Me
gusta gusta gusta13 yen relaci6n con Ia obra de Quintanilla Como el tiempo se nos
vino encima. Homenaje a B.C [Boanergues Cerrato]. Otro artista que ha real izado
performances es Arlstides Urena Ramos que vive y trabaja en Florencia, ltalia. A
finales de 1988, cre6 un tipo de acci6n multimedia con el sonido de interferencia
de un aparato de radio, un espacio de galerla vaclo, y una bastidor de tela sin
pintar Urena intervino en un cierto momenta, cambia Ia musica, colg6 varios
cuadros de sus colaboradores y circul6 pi atones con bolas de papel triturado de
las paginas de un ensayo sabre Ia exposici6n. Luego de convertir el espacio en su
taller personal, el artista desapareci6 sin decir palabra Posteriormente, Urena
present6 dos performances en 1994 y 1997 basados en motivos musicales de
ritmos caribeiios.
Los afios 90: El performance como acto politico
Muchas de las primeras acciones arriba descritas eran eventos aislados, con
frecuencia resultado de una iniciativa colectiva, pero un proceso sistematico de
investigaci6n del trabajo de performance no tuvo Iugar En Centroamerica, el arte
de acci6n, al igual que el video, se desarrollo como un lenguaje aut6nomo para Ia
expresi6n artlstica y el activismoalrededor de 1997. Esto fue parte de un proceso
dinamico que sigui6 a Ia firma del ultimo tratado de paz en 1996, que puso fin a
las decadas de los conflictos reg ionales.
Sin embargo, Manuel Mantilla fue uno de los artistas que continuaron trabajando
en este media. Su pals, Panama, no particip6 en Ia guerra abiertamente y
permaneci6 mas informado de las noticias globales Comenz6 Ia decada con una
pieza llamada En memoria de Halabja, Ciudad de las imagenes silenciosas (1990),
que estaba relacionada con Ia masacre de los kurdos par Saddam Hussein en
1988. El publico tenia que adaptarse a Ia pieza con cuidado. En un espacio bajo,
con poca luz, el publico debra agacharse pa ra ver tres ca1as que el artista habra
preparado previa mente una con Ia imagen de una niiia con Ia pie I destruida, otra
de unas ruinas urbanas y Ia tercera de varios huesos y f6siles Mientras se
escuchaba una y otra vez Ia melodia de El vue/a del abejorro, de Rimsky Korsakov,
el mtista entregaba un texto sabre Iii masacre al publico
Es interesante notar que el performance ha sido, en geneml, una expr ··sicin
femenina en Centroamerica, par lomenos entre los aiios de 1997 y 2002. fvluchos
de los arti~ta s abordaron as untos de genera desde distintas perspecti as
relacionadas con su particular contexto de vidJ, que varia mucho de Guatem~la a
Nicaragua a Costa Rica En 1997, Pri scilla Monge realiz6 un performance p(iblico
solitario y no anunciado en las calles de San Jose titulado D1a sangriento El primer
dia de su menstruaci6n, vistiendo un par de pantalones cubiertos de toallas
sanitarias, real i 6 distintas gestiones en Ia ciudad mientras Ia sangre flula y
machaba el trasero de sus pantalones La acci6n fue documen taJa auistancia por
un fotografo, y Ia artista recuerda que las reacciones de los transe(mtes osci la rf1n
de Ia indiferencia al asco a Ia preocupaci6n Monge se ha referido a Ia
menstruaci6n en varios de sus trabajos de manera sutil e indirecta, usando toallas
sanitarias para crear objetos tales como pelotas de futbol y banderas, y
construyendo "cuartos para el aislamiento y protecci6n". donde Ia sangre es
sugerida en Iugar de ser representada Entre 1998 y 2000, Monge produjo Las
lecciones, una serie de tres videos. En Ia segunda y tercera lecciones, Ia artista
misma es quien realizaba el performance Como (des}vestirse y Como morir de
amor's En el primero, Ia artista danzaba y se desvestia en una sala silenciosa al
son de una caja musical, pero el video en blanco y negro presenta el acto de
desvestirse al reves, de modo que Ia artista comenzaba desnuda y tenninaba
vestida con una ropa que dista mucho de los atuendos trpicos de una stripper En
294
Como morir de amar. video filmado en color, Ia artista se inspiraba en Ia estetica
y el tempo las telenovelas, encarnando a una mujer que espera interminablemente
a su amante, llorando y viendo el tiempo pasar, jugando el papel de Ia mujer
sometida. Despues de varias horas, desesperada, tom6 una pistola y se dispar6
en Ia boca. La sangre empez6 a correr y parecla que todo habra terminado con un
final previsible Sin embargo, Ia imagen final muestra a Monge limpiandose Ia
boca y levantandose de su tocador para alejarse, modificando el tipico final tragico
y convirtiendolo en un acto cfnico nadie nunca se muere de am or.
)
El performance se convirti6 una importante declaraci6n artistica en Guatemala
despues de Ia guerra, cuando Ia ciudadania comenz6 a retomar los espacios
publicos que le habfan sido negados par los militares como puntas de control
estrategico. '6 Par un Iado, las personas en general han vuelto al centro hist6rico de
Guatemala y se sienten alga liberadas de los miedos de un pasado violento y por
otro, Ia falta de infraestructura institucional, museos, galerias, u otros espacios de
exhibici6n ha llevado a artistas a crear obras al aire libre. AI aparecer entre 1999
y 2000, no tuvo paralelos en Ia region Entre las figuras principales que surgieron
alrededor de 1998, muchas de las cuales fueron mujeres, estan Regina Jose
Galindo, Maria Adela Oiaz, Sandra Monterroso y Jessica Lagunas Con las
dificultades de ser mujer en el contexto de Guatemala, han abordado Ia violencia,
Ia sexualidad, Ia subalternidad, y el feminismo de manera particular Muchas de
elias tam bien eran poetas. Uneven to importante tuvo Iugar en Guatemala en 1999,
curado por el grupo PAl (Proyecto Arte lndependiente)ll, en el cual particip6 Ia
mayor!a. Galindo present6 El dolor en un paiiuelo Desnuda y amarrada a una
camilla en una habitaci6n oscura, el cuerpo de Galindo funcionaba como una
pantalla que 1ecibia las imagenes proyectadas de peri6dicos que mostra an
articulos sabre violencia contra las mujeres, violaciones y asesinatos. Ese mismo
ano, Ia artista tuvo una exposici6n individual en Ia Galerla Selia de Vico, en Ia cual
mostr6 una pieza que consolidaba el caracter transgresivo de Ia desnudez er' su
obra El cielo /lora tanto que deberfa de ser mujer Se meti6 en una baiiera Ilena de
agua, sumergiendose varias veces hasta casi ahogarse, saliendo escasamente · I
superficie para respirar. El mismo aiio, durante el II Festival Cultural en Ia ciudad
de Guatemala. Galindo se colg6 de los areas de Ia Oficina de Correos, ubicada 8n
un area donde se realizan operaciones de cambia moneta rio en el mercado negro.
Vestida con una especie de rop6n de monaguillo y sostenida por un arnes elevado
par encinlil de Ia call e, lei a sus poemas en vozalta y arrancaiJa las paginao de ~ : 1 1
libra despues decacla lectura. cr e~ ndn un caos en Ia callc, con genteque c01 riJ J
rescatar lashoj<Js de pa~el quevolaban Esta piezasc titulo Lavoy agritar J/ h l 'tl
El siguiente ano. Galindo realiz6Wllios performancesque. vistasretrospectiviln' ;n· ~.
fueron una preparaci6n para las accioncs mas extremas que ha rcalizado rL .< "
entonces. Una de elias fue Todos estamos muriendo. rea lizada duranteel simpoo;t
Temas Centralcs. en el afio 2000 Tuvo Iugar en uno de las pequenas ton e c!n
observaci6n de una antigua prisi6n que fue restaurada y convertida en cen tr ~'
cultural. Agachada. desnuda y conectada a un tanque de oxlgeno a traves de U!' l
mascara, permanecio en Ia tone alrededur de cuar~nta ycinco minutos, hastn .,.;c
se consumi6 todo el oxigeno. En Ia e~pos ici6n Vivir aquf. ..; Galindo eligi6 invectau:
cliez mililitros de Valium y qued6 inconsciente por varias horas, reflejando el dro ~ ~n
de escapar de Ia realidad guatemalteca Encierrosse realiz6 durante Ia exposicit\n
colectiva Parentr1sis en el zool6gico.·· Galindo se encerr6 en una estructura dP
bloques de concreto, se llando Ia construcci6n con el ultimo bloque cementa, \
permaneciendo sola en el cuarto oscuro par un tiempo indeterminado. hasta q11e
las pare des de concreto fueron derribadas para liberarla. Durante Octubre azul, un
eventocon un mes de duraci6n en Ia ciudad. coordinado par Cazali, Galindo realiz6
una de sus mas poderosos y escandalosos performances. En No perdemos nada
con nacer, Ia artista se habfa colocado previa mente en una balsa para cadavercs
y fue aJTOJada casi inconsciente, en el basurero municipal de Guatemala Colocar., L
.on una categorla de basurahumana, producia un sentimiento de horror con el [j!le
 muchos guatemaltecos podrfan identificarse. La artista fue invitada ese ana par
Harald Szeemann para participar en Ia Biennale di Venezia de 2001 y nuevamente
en 2005 par Rosa Martinez. Gano el premia Leon de Oro para artistas jovenes
Galindo es una de las artistas mas solidas, consistentes y va lientes de Ia region,
y desde el principia su trabajo ha sido no solo audaz, sino tambien coherente y
caracterizado par una dens1dad de sentldo. Pertenece aun contexto centroamencano,
pero aIa vez logra trascender Ia situacion guatemalteca Posee una man era ferrea
y resuelta de siempre referirse a los subalternos de Ia sociedad, las mujeres en
particular En realidad, se trata de cualquier "otro" que ha sido sometido a Ia
violencia Sus performances estan directamente relacionados con Ia brutal
sociedad patriarcal en Ia que vive y ponen a prueba Ia resistencia del publico.
Galindo se ha colocado en ellugar de las victimas, infligiendo sabre su pequeno
I cuerpo el mismo tipo de violencia que denuncia.
JessicaLagunas crecio en Guatemala yactualmente vive en Nueva York. Su trabajo
se enfoca en los efectos de Ia moda sabre una sociedad en Ia cua l las mujeres
dependen de su apariencia y tambien hace referencia a Ia exclusion y Ia actitud
machista que cons idera a las muJeres como propiedad personal y privada Una de
sus primeras acciones que data del1999 ycontinuo hasta llegar a fijar su residencia
en Nueva York en 2004 consistia en colocar un par de zapatos rajas de tacon alto
frente a importantes instituciones de arte en todos los lugares adonde Ia artista
viajaba. Sin embargo, siempre eran colocados Iuera de las instituciones, en los
mar_,enes de esos espacios deseados, representando de cierta manera Ia exclusion
de losartistas perifericos de los centros de poder artistico, pero tambien poniendo
de rel ieve Ia invisibilidad de las mujeres. La crftico Aida Toledo se pregunta donde
estan las piernas, Ia mujer que calzo esos zapatos y camino hasta esos centros. El
uso de los zapatos de tacon rojos se inicio en Guatemala en 1999 durante una
exposicion colectiva curada par el grupo PAl. Titulada La sombra, esta pieza
consistfa en dos zapatos rojos enterrados en una plataforma de cementa de cuatro
por cuatro metros. AI final de Ia exposicion, Ia artista extrajo los zapatos, como un
acto simbolico de liberacion de las limitantes sociales. y escribio los nombres de
muj res que conocfa en Ia plataforma antes de que esta Iuera destruida. El tipo de
zapataque escogio Ia artista con nota una voluntaria limitacion del movimiento fibre
y, aIa vez, es una referenciaa los estereotipos de Ia indumentaria "sexy" Tambien,
estestacones simbolizan Ia aceptacion de las mujeres de un tipo de atuendo creado
par" ,.atisfacer Ia demanda de los hombres. La Galeria Belia de Vi co, que con
frecLencia fla apoyado a artistas jovenes y obras de performance, presento su
inst !_~c ion/performance Titulo de propiedad en 1999. Un par de esposas grabadas
COli '1 inscripci on "Ella de 81" fueron colgaclas de Ia pared con un gua1 dia de
seg: ;dad vigilandolas Durante los ultimos elias de Ia exposicilin, el esposo de In
arti ··· ~. Rani rvlocan. tambien artista, reemplaz6 al guardia. Jessica Lagunas
tan.:1ien fla real izado performances en sus videos posteriores, poniendose
maquillaje o pintandose las ufias obsesivamente durante una flora, poco a poco
des::gurandose los labios. ojos y ufias.
Sa wlr3 Monterroso hn habi Jdo directomentc c!c Ia ~ l structuras rle po er,
enfr ~ando se en Ia ecuaci6n hombrel mujer, pero sus obras mas logradas son las
de !o· ailos mas recientes ;'1 En uno de sus rerfnrmanc s de 1999, Ale Femx, se
referfa a los acuerdos de paz firmados en Guatemala en 1996. La artista us6
imap nes fotograticas en gelatina raja, una de las cuales mostraba el desnudo
parcial de una mujer Cuando Ia pieza fue censurada en ellugar de Ia exposici6n
-unlanco local-, Ia artista realiz6 parte del performance planeado en una calle.
La desnudez como una declaracion continua siendo una cuestion controversial.
Marfa Adela Dfaz, quien como Regina Jose Galindo es poeta, presento dos
performances en 1999 relacionaclos conla escritura. pero contextua lizados en un
ambiente doloroso o desagraclable que transmitfa Ia posicion marginal del poeta,
asf r~m o el poder que confiere crear desde el horror. Para ell/ Festival del Centro
Hist6rico, en Poesfa salida del pecho, el publico podia pinchar los pezones de Ia
artista con un alfiler sabre una composicion fotogratica de senos de mujer. Tam bien
realizo un performance de 45 minutos dentro de una alcantarilla en el Parque
Centra l de Ciudad de Guatemala que llamo "performance poetica". En Para Ia
superficie se introdujo en Ia alcantarilla con su maquina de escribir y a traves de
un sistema de cuerdas atadas a un arbol, enviaba sus poemas escritos en Ia
inmundicia hacia Ia superficie. Para el evento Vivir aquf, en 2000, Dfaz se hizo
encerrar par noventa minutos con 25,000 larvas de mosca en una estructura de
vidrio transparente ubicada en un espacio publico. El calor acelero el ciclo de vida
de las larvas y las moscas empezaron a nacer dentro de Ia caja Laartista, vestida
de blanco ycon los ojos vendados, se mantuvo impasible al incesante movimiento
de miles de moscas a su alrededor. La pieza, ironicamente titulada Ambrosia, tenia
Ia intencion de transmitir como Ia artista percibfa Ia vida en Guatemala como una
experiencia tan insoportable como verse cubierta de moscas sin posibilidad de
escapar. Ese mismo afio, se coloc6 desnuda dentro de un edificio historico de Ia
ciudad, pero frente a un gran ventanal, a Ia vista de los transeuntes. AI mismo
tiempo. arrancaba los ojos de unos pescados que estaban en una cubeta y los
ponia en un frasco, una reflexion sabre Ia violencia de su pais. Las alusiones a Ia
sexualidad eran explicitas en un pais dominado par una moral extremadamente
conservadora, asf como referencias a Ia tortura, a los testigos que han sido
cegados, y a Ia muerte. Otros trabajos de Ia artista, que hoy en dia vive en los
Estados Unidos, tratan temas de Ia migraci6n y Ia experiencia del desplazamiento
Finalmente, Anibal Lopez ha realizado muchas piezas de accion en Ia ciudad de
Guatemala, tanto individualmente como con Diego Britt, instalando omodificando
sefiales cle transito que viol an las reg las de Ia comunicaci6n y ponen de relieve Ia
violencia generalizada que sufre Ia ciudad. Otras acciones se relacionan con Ia
ocupaci6n virtual del espacio Entre 1999 y 2001, hizo Ia Mancha de los 55,000
puntas(un punta pintado en un periodico con un tiraje de 55,000) y Distancia entre
dos puntas. En esta ultima, Ia parte posterior de dos carros identicos fue cubierta
con una tela blanca con un gran punta negro. Los carros circu laron par Ia ciudad
durante floras, registrando diferentes distancias entre elias a causa del tratico.
Punta en movimiento (2000) es parte de esta serie, asf como Linea de 12000
puntas (Monterrey, Mexico, 2000), y 1265 KM, presentada en Ia Bienal de La
Habana en1997. El artista logra transmitir las caracteristicas fisicas de un camino
que clesaparece al tiempo que es marcado. desmaterializando el concepto de linea.
Otras dos obras importantes de Lopez deben ser mencionadas Ia accion 30 de
junio, : 2000, organizada par Conte.< to ; ' La nocfle del 29 de junio, el artista arroj6
un cargamento de carbon (un camion cle carga) enla avenicla por donde desfilaria
el ejercitoel dia siguienle. Cuando Ia policfa enconli6 el carbon, limpiaronellugar.
pero Ia mancha de ca rbon qued6 en el pavimento. El ejercito desfil6 y fue
fotografiado par los artistas con Ia mancha de carbon, recordando las aldeas
inclfgenas que fueron quemadas hasta el suelo durante Ia pear epoca de Ia guerra
La pieza fue selece1onada par Harald Szeemann para Ia Biennale eli Venecia de
2001y recibi6 uno de los premios pnra artistas j6venes Contexto tam !en apoy6
otra acci6n controvertida ese mismo ano. En El prestamo, Lopez camino par Ia calle
con una pistola cargada y detuvo al primer hombre con quien se encontrn.
pidiendole su dinero y explicandole que no se trataba de un robo sino de un
prestamo y que su pago serfa Ia conciencia y conocimiento del arte que sus hijos
ganarian Con el dinero que obtuvo. unos US$1 DO en moneda local. el artista imprimio
un cartel en el que describia Ia acci6n y pagaba los gastos de Ia inauguracion Esta
acci6n provoco reacciones virulentas, inclusive en Ia comunidad artistica, yun debate
interesante con relaci6n a los lfmites y Ia etica en el arte,11 particularmente en
contextos en que Ia muerte y Ia brutalidad se han vuelto parte de Ia vida diaria ~
En retrospectiva. se puede afirmar que es imposible disociar el contexto social y
politico centroamericano de los desarrollos en el arte de accion Este comell76 a
 articular un discurso a finales de los afios 90, que como hemos vista se origin6
principalmente en Guatemala. Muchos artistas han continuado su trabajo en distintas
direcciones. Algunos, a traves de Ia participaci6n en eventos internacionales, han
ampliado sus referencias y creado obras que trascienden el contexto local sin
olvidarlo Sus reflexiones se aplican a situaciones marginales en cualquier Iugar
Tambien han influido artistas de acci6n en otros pafses del area Esta influencia no
se ha limitado a los temas, sino que ha permitido valorar este media como una
herramienta poderosa para crear conciencia de Ia situaci6n actual en sus pafses.
Agradezco aMonica Kupfer, historiadora de arte, escritora ycuradora. una de las fundadoras
de Ia Bienal de Panama; aRaul Quintanilla, artista. curador yuno de los fundadores del grupo
Artefactoria, que estuvo activo en Managua a partir de 1992. tambien editor de Artefacto
hasta 2003 y actual mente de Ia revista de arte Estragos; Rosina Cazali. curadora y escritora
de Guatemala; Ileana Alvarado. curadorayescritora de San Jose; Juan Luis Rodriguez, artista
de San Jose; y otros que me han proporcionado pistas sabre fuentes de investigaci on.
El "Arco Chato" era una arcada baja del barrio de San Felipe enla ciudad de Panama. que
posteriormente se derrumbo.
Citado en Ileana Alvarado. Juan Luis Rodriguez. El Combate (San Jose: Fundacion Museos
del Banco Central. 1995). 22.
Conversacion con el autor, Noviembre de 2007.
5 Bouvard. Philippe. "Un point noir et flaque de sang en vedette d Ia Biennale." Le Figaro.
(27- 28 de septiembre. 1969) Citado en Alvarado. Ibid. 42.
Informacion recogicla de rnensajes electronicos con Ia curadora guc~temalteca Rosina CazJii.
Informacion provista por Monica Kupfer. Panama.
B A1urdia rue incluida en eleven to Esltecho dudoso. que tuvo Iugar un varios sitios dt:; San
Jose y fue organizado por TEOR/eTicay curado por Ia autora y Tamara Oiazen 2006.
/like America and America Ides me (Amo a America y Amenca me ama) Rene Block
Gallery, Nueva York. 1974.
10 William Walker (1824-1860) fue un filibustero del estado de Tennessee. Participo en
acciones rnilitares con el obretivo de obtcner el control de las naciones centroamericanas
y anexarlas a los Estados Unidos. Este hecho fue una expresion de Ia creencia
estadounidense en Ia doctrina del Destino Monifiesto. Walker fue presidente de Nicaragud
(1856- 1857) hasta que Costa Rica le declare Ia guerra en mayo de 1857. Walker se rindi6
y fu e erecutado en Honduras en 1860.
11 RAf e. un acronimo fnmmlo pnr los nnrnbres rie losartiqasp<~ rlicipc~ nto ~: R,-:t'Ji Ouintnrrill.\
·\raricio ,\rtilnlo )' Thni: Fon tenui!G.
iL' Co:wo cl ectronrco li t) Raul Uuin!i1rHIIn a Ia autorJ. 12 ric: octuhre de 20u7
13 Lr;.-, :uti, tils pnrticir1nlc; f u ~r ~n Rc~ q ~r c l Du~'Jda. Thai ~· Fo n~cn .lie, Luis l. ioraiP ... Puilirio
GJrciOJ y R~rrl Ouintanill 1Armijo
14 Enmarzo de 1988. las trop<rs d~ Saddam Hussei n Jtararon. par aim y por tierra. a csta
ciudad kurdi! ubicada a unos 260 kil6rnetros de Baghdad y cerca de 1<1 frontera con lrrin.
Usaron vdrios tipos de arrnas quimicJs \' mataron a sus 5000 habitantes. emencnando
tamiJi(n las aguas ) croando ri csgos a Ia s~ lud a largo plam
1: ~a p:i""crJ ·lc P"1 ~ ~er;,', ti'"IJ''1 LeL.:idn de n7i!IJUil11jD, f' i'J prc"nrt crl~ P ~ ' ·! Rr>·"/ rlr
Siio Paulo en 1998 en un pro'tecto por encarg ode Ia autora. que incluyn a quir >C i) artist<lS
d~ Centroam8rica y el Caribe. Una pubiicacion sabre cliclro pro' ec to est:J aun cli.;ponil "
Central America and the Caribbean. A S/01)' in Black and 111/ute.
296
16 Aida Toledo. una estudiosa guatemalteca que trabaja en Ia Universidad de Alabama ha
escrito abundantemente sabre el tema. Ver. por ejemplo, "Contornos del mapa de, las
l
exclusiones: algunas observaciones sabre Ia escritura de mujeres guatemalteca .... Pasos
a desnivel. Mapa urbana de Ia cultura contemporanea en Guatema!J. Rosina Cazali ed
(Guatemala: Ediciones La Curanderia, 2003). 34-37; "En el performance y Ia instala~ion:
espacios imaginarios de artistas guatemaltecas." Espejos que dejan ver. Maria Elvira
lriarte and Eliana Ortega, eds. Isis lntemacional Review, No. 33 (Santiago de Chile
December 2002). 145- 56; "Poesia. cuerpo y performance como verdaderas emergencia;
esteticas en Ia Guatemala de hoy", Temas Centrales (San Jose de Costa Rica Teoretica-
Tile Rockfeller Foundation-GATE Foundation-Hivos. 2001). 87- 94.
17 Sin pelos en Ia lengua, Plaza G& T. curado por el Grupo PAl, Guatemala, 1999
18 Temas Centrales tuvo Iugar en mayo de 2000 en el Auditorio Nacional de San Jose. Costa
Rica, organi zado por TEOR/eTica en colaboracion con Tile Gate Foundation, Paises Bajos,
y patrocrnada por Tile Rockefeller Foundatron y HIVOS. El tema fue "Pnlcticas artisticas y
posibilidades de curaduria en Centroamerica" y fue moderado por Cuauhtemoc Medina.
1
Existe una publicacion bilingUe exhaustiva.
19 Curada por Rosina C3i ali y presentada en el Museo lxchel. Guatemala, 2000. 1
20 Esta exposicion se llevo acabo en el Zoologico ''La Aurora" yvarios de los artistascligieron
clesarrollar el tema del encarcelarniento.
21 Tits tortillas, mi amor es un reciente y muy poderoso video cle una accion. en Ia que Ia
artista pre para una masade maiz. no moliendo los granos. como seilace tradicionalmente
l
sino masticandolos escupiendolos para hacer las tortillas y tcrminando r: l p~oces~
decorandolas con su propia sangre.
22 El 30 cle junio e:, el aniversario del ejercito guatemdlteco. uno de los mas temidos en el
I'
lllUIIdO.
23 La Galeria Selia de Vico se Lcnvirtio en "Contexto" yse especializa en apo'{Jr dcCiunes En
el espacio publico. sicndo responsable de mucha de I investigacion de estos aflistas
24 Esta pieza formo parte cle Toe/a incluido, una exposici6n que fue curada por I autora y
Santiago Olrno para el Centro Cultural Loncle Duque en Madrid y que viajo al f,1useo de
Arte y Discrio Contemporaneo de Costa Rica en 2004. Hdy un catalogo clisponible Para mas
informacion sabre el tema . vease SituJciones artisticas ldtinoamPricanas I. publicado por
TEOR/eTrca en 2005.
25 Para mas informacion sabre estos aspectos. vease el ensayo de Ia autora en el catalogo:
1
Gloha/ Feminisms: Nefl Dime/ions in Contemporary Art. Maura Reilly and Lindii Nocillin, I
eels. (Ne\'1 York: Brooklyn Museum. 007).
II
!
r
J
 Marfa Teresa Hincapie: Acci6n, corporeidad y el dom inio de lofemenino en Colombia
Marfa Iovino
El hecho de que en 1990 se premiara par primera vez un performance en un
encuentro artistico en Colombia demuestra cuan rec iente es el desarrollo de este
media en el pais. De igua l manera. el que Ia artista premiada en esa ocasi6n
(XXXIII Salon Nacional de Artistas) Iuera Marfa Teresa Hincapie, indica el papel
refe encia l que ella ha desempefiado y el reconocimiento de su trabajo como el
punta de madurez del performance en Colombia.
]
Una cosa es una cosa es Ia obra que marco ese momenta, subrayado par Ia
unanimidad del jura do que Ia premia y par Ia repercusi6n que, tanto Ia obra como
l Iaartista, tuvieron en otros pafses con posterioridad Laobra es uno de los mejores
ejemplos de las exploraciones sabre lo femenino que marcaron el perfodo e
introdujo variables nuevas en el performance de America Latina. AI dominio
c01 poral y Ia concentraci6n de Ia artista durante Ia acci6n, se sumo Ia compleja
l simbolog fa que Hincapie estructur6.
Resignificando materiales modestos, construy6 durante dos horas una gran espiral de
1 trazosortogonales en Ia sala de exposici6n. Cientos de objetos tornados deun hagar
hu111ilde se utilizaron para crear Una cosa es una cosa. Hincapie los tomaba
ceremonial, silenciosa y pausadamente, uno a uno, de una balsa de viaJe Alineaba
utensilios de cocina, materiales de limpieza. maquillaje, tejidos de mesa, de cama y
de cocina. vestidos, alimentos y otros bienes domesticos cotidianos. Estaconstitufa.
juntoaIa imagenfuerte yaustera de Ia artista, Ia primera presencia de una acci6n en
Ia r:uese descubrfa atraves del proceso reorganizador. Ia idea de infinito en una obra
de labor interminable, artesanal yde profunda semantica. En una hoja fotocopiada que
Iaartista presentaba al pCdJiico como Onica expl icaci6n de su labor. se lefa
Yosola El solo. Ella sola. Un espacio solo Un rincon solo. Una linea sola.
Todas las casas estan solas. Todos estamos solos Todo empacado. Todo
en caja. Todo en Ia tula Todo en el bolso. Todo en las balsas. Todo en un
rincon. Todo par partes. Todo muy cerca. Un manton de arroz. Un manton
de azucar Un manton de cafe. Un manton de papel Un manton de casas
Si bien antes de esta acci6n Hincapie y otros creadores en Colombia habfan
trnbajado en el ambito de lo femen ino, Ia acci6n, Ia corporalidad y Ia mirada
alt.,rna, 1 Ia atenci6n sabre el tiempo y el movimiento como desplazamiento ffsico
esunasunto que tom6 importancia a mediaclos de los ochenta. Esto profundiz6 Ia
rr;·;is de Ia representaci6n tal como se venia trabajando envariosmedias artfsticos
d. r!e inicios de los sesenta.
fL :;stos aiios. las artes visuales colombianas estuvieron influidaspar lasreflexiones
sr· 1· L Ia crisis tras el asesinato dellfder popular Jorge Eliecer Gaitan en 1948 y las
e.• uemas contradicciones sociales que Ia provocaban. Asimismo. se producian las
rimeras manifestaciones de un colapso de las urbes en America Latina y en
Colombia. Este estado alterado se agrav6 con el incremento de Ia violencia desde
1332, cuando fue asesinado el Ministro de Justicia. Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Fue el
91'esohist6rico que marco el estallidode13 mas graveguerra entre los carteles de
Ia ·Jroga y el gobierno. Se desat6 el homicidio. arrastrando entre sus multiples
victimas a varios candidatos a Ia presidencia, jueces y representantes politicos de
tad'slas regiones del pais, periodistas, testigos osospechososde testigos, asf como
a.h3sde 3000 miembros de los partidos deizquierda oasospechosos de pertenecer
a r Ilos A Ia ruina material, moral y social sigui6 Ia interminable escalada de
s,,cuestros y Ia multiplicaci6n de grupos guerrilleros y paramilitares
Enel proceso reflexivo que esa crisisha exigido, en el que "vida" y "muerte" II egan
a ser palabras que se repiten insistentemente, con sentido y tambien con
il', iferencia Marfa Teresa Hincapie fue Iaprimeraartista que asumi61a vida como
proposici6n artfstica. Integra su cuerpo en su practica para crear un espacio propio
b te senticlo de lo propio estaba relacionaclo con su presencia en el mundo como
fuerza femenina y multidimensional; iba mas alia de cualquier asunto de genera.
Hincapie partfa de su reconocimiento como ser en un sistema ecol6g ico inmenso,
macro y microsc6picamenete, lo que combatfa cualquier premisa te6rica y Ia
conducfa al reencuentro con lo sagrado y lo eterno. El argumento de Ia artista era
Iavida en su senti do mas amplio Par eso anul6 progresivamente Ia representaci6n
en su trabajo, pues Ia entendfa como un estorbo para Ia comprensi6n de lo real.
Antes que Hincapie, Ia artista calena Maria Evelia Marmolejo realiz6 performances
feministas en Colombia. Fueron acciones realizadas desde 1981 en Ia Gal erfa San
Diego en Bogota yen los Sa Iones Atenas, organizados por Edua rdo Serrano en el
Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota Las acciones de Marmolejo, evidentemente
inspiradas en las lfneas expresionistas del Arte Corporal, se centraron en el tema
de Ia mujer como cuerpo dador de vida. Para ella, forzaba medicamente su
menstruaci6n, de Ia que daba evidencia con un goteo a manera de escritura en el
espacio, mientras actuaba y transitaba desnuda en el. Otra artista de referencia
en elmismo perfodo fue Ia antioquefia Marfa Teresa Cano, quien reprodujo su
cuerpo en chocolate a escala natural (1x1) para que el publico lo consum iera y
digiriera Ia noche de Ia inauguraci6npor invitaci6n suya (Salon Atenas, 1984) No
obstante, estos trabajos se mantienen dentro de los If mites del tema temen ino.
Tres obras que explicitaron tempranamente el interes de Marfa Teresa Hincapie por
Ia idea del infinito, lo infima y lo circundante fueron Si esto fuera un principa del
infinita (1987). Parquedades (1987), realizada en colaboraci6n con Jose Alejandro
Restrepo yPunta de fuga(1989) Estos trabajosse nutrieron del dialog aqueIa artista
tuvo a fines de Ia decada de 1980 con los artistas Alvaro Restrepo, Doris Sa lcedo y
Jose Alejandro Restrepo. Con este ultimo Hincapie colabor6 estrechamente al
comenzar su trayectoria como artista del performance. Atraves de estos contactos
yde Ia lectura de Joseph Beuys, conoci6 el performance como genera del arte visual.
Hincapie proven fa del mundo del teatro por lc que pudo ofrecer una orientaci6n y
autonomia diferentes al performance Desarro llo una exitosa carrera actoral por
mas de una decada, Ia cual concluy6 en 1984 con el extenso ycelebrado mon61ogo
Ondina, escrito expresamemte para ella por Juan Monsalve, Director del grupo
Acto Latino Con ese mon61ogo Ia artista viaj6 por Colombia y varios paises de
Europa y el Oriente. Ondina dio corporeidad a influencias que maduraron con
Hincapie, tales como las ensenanzas de JerzyGrotowsky,' Ia via experimental con
los recursos del cuerpo y Ia escena y el teatro No japones :
En Ondina, un extenso mon61ogo sabre lo femenino. Ia artista paso de lo
representaci6n a Ia cada vez mas pura expresi6n de ser En palabras del autor
Juan Monsalve:
Ondina es un laberinto de destellos, en el cualla mujer lucha, am a, delira,
busca ycomprende. Una mujer que como anima. mary vi entre como madre.
como amante, como hiJa y hermana, pregunta par ella misma "par que no
esta sola conmigo mujer profunda, mas profunda que el abi smu al que ~e
aferran las fuen tes del pasado. Cuanto mas me acerco a ti mas te hunciPs
en las hondonadas de las preexistencias '
Es natural entonces que las obras que surgieron despues (Parquedades, Si esto
fuera un principo del in fin ita y Punta de fuga) esten dominadas por Ia idea de Ia
lentitud del tiempo en sf yen relaci6n con lo femenino. Fueroninterpretaciones que
en 1991concluirian en una reflex ion sabre Ia maternidad (Estiramienta de amor),
expresi6n clara de Ia permanencia y Ia continuidad como principios ecol6gicos de
vida que domina ron Ia vision de Ia artista.
En Ia video-instalaci6n Parquedades, Ia artista estaba sentada en actitud de espera
enla banca de un parque. Sepintaba los labios. abrfa ycerraba Ia cartera que llevaba
 sabre el regazo. mientras se transmitian imagenes de un devenir sin climax en los
televisores dispuestos en el piso de Ia sala. Par su parte, Si esto fuera un principo
del infinito consistio en transitar con sus objetos personales par el escenario del
abandonado Teatro Cuba de Bogota La accion ocurriolentamente durante dos dias.
en send as jornadas de dace horas. Punta de Fuga volvio a presentar. ahara en el
Museo de Arte de Ia Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogota). un escenario en
tiempo ralentizado de los hechos que ocurren en Ia cotidianeidad de una mujer
comun. En esta oportunidad Hincapie barria. cocinaba, ordenaba, planchaba eiba de
un Iado para otro. Estos elementos estarian despues en Una cosa es una cosa. pero
Ia artista habria de agregar el enfasis simbolico de Ia infinitud, de Ia linea ydel ciclo
a traves del continuo hacer y deshacer de Ia espiral
Hincapie explorolo urbana en Vitrina (1990) En el espacio de presentacion publica
de las mercancias, hibridolas funciones de una mujer que lim pia un Iugar publico
-y que par Ia mismo es inobservada con indiferencia par los transeuntes- con las
de una mujer que los atrae ycoquetea con elias. A Ia largo de seis horas Ia artista
limpio con jabon Ia vitrina, labor queinterrumpia para pintarse los Ia bios ymarcar
un beso en Ia superficie transparente. Despues de volver a limpiar, delineaba su
cuerpo en el vidrio, con enfasis en las zonas sexuales para despues integrar el
cuerpo a su dibujo. Natural mente, a pocos minutos los que pasaban par ellugar,
bien caminando o desde autos y buses, reaccionaron a esta simple alteracion o
ruptura no violenta de Ia linealidad.
El paso a Ia busqueda de Ia sagrado y de los mas estrictos niveles de vivencia y
de no representacion de Ia personal ocurre a partir de 1992. En ese ano, a raiz de
su participacion en Ia exposici6n Ante Ame1ica. curada par Carolina Ponce de Leon
en Ia Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (Bogota), Hincapie decidio incorporarse aI Iugar
de Ia muestra. Durmio durante tres naches seguidas y al aire libre en el patio
central del recinto (una casa colonial) para presentar posteriormente Ia obra Esta
tierra es mi cuerpo Este trabajo adquirio un sentido nuevo cuando en 1995 Ia
artista realiz6 Tu eres santo en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota Alii
permanecio seis dias en silencioso recogimienio yen ayuno, reducida al espacio
que rodeo de velas encendidas. En un escritorio que ubic6 en un extrema de Ia
sal a. enmarcado en circulos concentricos trazados con grama yen el que estaban
dispuestas sus lecturas deesos dias (todas sabreIa sagrado), Iaartista se mantuvo
::entacla durante las horas rle \'isil a d,;l pCrblic o, contestando por escrito las
pr8guntas que IRformulaban los intcresados. tambi en por escrito.
/ri cres santo concluJO a HaciJ Ia sagrado (I gg5), un intenso trabajo de
inves tigacion-peregrina je en caminatas cit Ia artista por sitios sagraclos y por
paisajes naturales cl.o Colombia. que se exticndi6 por varios ar-ias y constituyu el
so porte de Divina proporciun (1996). Ia obra que le merecio otro premia en el
XXXVI Salon Nacional de Artistas. Con total austeridad, Ia artista apodero su
presencia ante el publico; caminodescalzade un extrema aotro del amplio espacio
industrial donde presentaba sutrabajo La lentitud sobrecogedora yel manejo del
cu erpo exaltaban las contradicciones entrL celcriJJd y necesidad, entre
pragmatismo \' vida. entre Ia sagrado y lo que lo violenta. al ti empo que ubicaba
el valor de un ser vivo en el univuso que habita. Parolelamente los brotes de
grama que ella sembro entre las fisuras y grietas del suelo connotabanla manera
azarosa en que lo vital se sobrepone a lo artificial
Alvaro Restrepo realizo busquedas similares con Ia hibriclezentre performance y
danza contemporanea. A el se debio Ia fundacion del Colegio del Cuerpo
(Cartagena. 1997). propuesta no solo educativa y artistica, sino de recuperacion del
sentido de Ia ecologico y sagrado Restrepo reacciono ante Ia problematica de su
pals con Ia va lordCion del individuo como miembro de un complejisimo sistema
'ln un pais como Colombia, surniclo en una sangrienta crisis de val ores, el cuerpo del
hombreha perdidosudimension sagrada dimiamentc lo vemos mutilado, torturado y
asesinado." El caso de Am ada Tinoco, una de las estudiantes destacadas del Colegio
que Restrepo dirigia, ejemplificaba esta situacion:
Una muchacha de trece anos negra. bella. AI principia solo fue Amada de
nombre porque a esa muchacha le ases inaron a su padre y su madre
desaparecio Vive con su abuela, como el millon ymedia de desplazados que
actual mente agonizan en Colombia. A traves de Ia danza Amada recobro el
sentido de Ia vida que Colombia le violo, como milagro de Ia existencia
humana en una nacion en donde se apunala el cuerpo, donde se asesina
donde Ia masacre mata en masa los cuerpos y niega Ia posibilidad de 1~
muerte intima y digna 5
En Ia lectura internacional simplista sabre el arte en Colombia se le ha relacionado
restrictivamente con Ia imagen de Ia catastrofe. Este precepto niega Ia existencia
de un discurso profundamente articulado, par las dificiles condiciones en que ha
madurado. en respuestaaIa crisis de Ia ~1oclernidad yIa va loracion del significado
de Ia vida. Artistas como Do~is Salcedo. Oscar Munoz. Maria Teresa Hincapie, Jose
Alejandro Restrepo, Miguel Angel Rojas. Beatriz Gonzalez y Rolf Abderhalden, entre
otros. rebasan lo politico e iluminan las contradicciones vitales que impulsan y dan
razon aIa existencia. Su obra debe comprenderse en Ia inefable de Ia memoria yenel
eterno retorno que las representaciones discursivas estan inhabilitadas para reconocer.
Testigos de las ruinas, una dP la s creaciones destacabl es de Mapa Teatr'l
(realizada par Heidi, Elizabeth y Rolf Abderhalden). hizo patente Ia fuerza
interpretativa del performance colombiano. Se tratci de un trabajo colectivo de
una comunidad signad:J como problematica, que rescato sumemori~ y su sentido
de vida y permanencia en media de las urgencias del desplazarniento forzad o J
Esta obra traslado Ia mirada hacia Ia experiencia de Ia marginalidad Antes que
influir Ia trama. Mapa Teatro se interes6 par darle imagen y voz a Ia comun idad
desde su propio corazon. mas alia de las imposiciones narrativas extraiias de tip J
historico. social, pcriodistico. politico y gubernamental
La obra nacio de Ia investigacion realizada par el proyecto C'lindua. Un pacta par
Ia vida," entre los aiios 2000 y 2003. En ese periodo Mapa Teatro. con el apoyo de
Ia Alcaldia del Distrito Capital. desde su programa Observatorio urbana, trabajo en
dos de las zonas mas afectadas par los programa' de recuperacion del espaci::'
publico El prop6sito fundamental de fl:lapa Tcatro fue qenerar reflexi6n sabre lit
problematica s cncontradas Los lugares self'!ccionados por el qru po fueron lo'>
barrios de invasion de los cerros nororirmtii!es rlc 80(JOlii y, con especial enfasi.•.
el Barrio Santa lnes. dondt1 era ce lebre pur su ingobernabilidali durante decarL:;
Ia calle del Cartuchu Paro Mapa TLatrn, esto sitio consti <uill no solo uno de lc"
rn itos mas conocidos en Ia ciudad, sino tambi cn una referencia proxima. debidoa
que estaba ubicada en las proximidades de Ia Escuela de Artes del Distrito, e11 1,
que Rolf Abderhalden era profesor
Enla Calle del Cartuchil vi'.'iln ha ci wdc~ :o~ r!.'" l a ~:;~ n,- ~ ,r cnp 1 lil ri11d ' :l.
quienes huian del hambrc y IJ violcncia o buscaban oportunidacles laborale;·
Tambien habia recicladores. IJodegu' ros. prqu"nos romerciante\ nros ti ruta.·.
hombres solos y familias. llegada s inmeditamente despucs de Ia revuelta tras el
asesinato de Gaitan Como seiiala Abde rhalden
Debido aese particular estado de excepci6n qu'" Ia caracterizaba. Ia Calle
del Cartucho se convirtio en un punta estrategico de Ia ciuclad para toda
suerte de negocios y transacciones. legalese ilegales. pero tambi en pa ra
el desarrollo de las actividades mas ingeniosas de Ia economia del 1
rebusque Los sucesos tan intensos que movia ellugar. hicieron que par
crrios fuera conocidu par touos como Centro del temor.
 Era natural entonces que este Iuera uno de los objetivos del programa destinado
a Ia recuperacion de Ia ciudad. La dimension del problema al que se enfrento Ia
Alcaldla habra conducido a decisiones arbitrarias que tuvieron una resonancia
imprevista par los funcionarios del gobierno Estos hablan acordado demoler el
Iugar para construir el Parque Tercer Milenio. El parque, desprovisto de personalidad,
negarla Ia memoria del espacio y toda referencia historica, mltica, polltica y
humana referente a el.
El seguimiento exahustivo que hizo Mapa Teatro al desempeiio del proyecto y a
muchas de las vidas que afecto fue objeto de varias presentaciones A estas se
aiiadieron las dedicadas a los cerros orientales, con Ia que redondearon el proyecto
Cundua, Un pacta par Ia vida. Las indagaciones continuaron despues de 2003, lo
que dio Iugar a Ia produccion de un video, Test/go de las ruinas. En esta pieza, como
en C'undua, Ia memoria se entiende como una red multiple, hecha de en laces
materiales eintangibles, que se buscan para dar senti do yvalor a un grupo humano.
La obra clarifica con sensibles metatoras como cuando el senti do se ha extraviado,
se II ega a un estado en que los mismos problemas agravados pesan y frenan a toda
Ia sociedad, pero fundamental mente al grupo que ella castiga con Ia invisibilidad.
Test/go de las ruinas abrio con lucidez Iamirada a Iagran escena humana. Con voces
tomadas del desastre, las urgencias e ilusiones cotidianas, las ambiciones, dichas
ydesdichas de distintos seres, afirmaba que en el escenario real el protagonista es
cacla uno. La obra incorporo en el performance a Ia ultima habitante de Ia calle del
Cartucho, una mujer que preparaba are pas ychocolate caliente y estuvo trabajando
enellugar hasta el ultimo ella que le fue posible. Durante Ia presentaci6n de Iaobra
~sta mujer desempeii6 su oficio de siempre en un pequeno fog6n, que alento los
aromas en Ia ob1 a y marco como un com pas invariable Ia cotidianeidad del
desaparecido Cartucho AI final de Ia obra, como seiial de resistencia vital, Ia mujer
soltaba una poderosa carcajada sabre Ia imagen de las ruinas.
Mapa Teatro ha sido una organizaci6n unica en el arte en Colombia Desde su
fundacion en 1984 par Heidi, Elizabeth y Rolf Abderhalden ha basado su labor en
un amplio ejercicio investigativo, que cobija problematicas contemporaneas y
reflexiones artrsticas en campos diversos, asr como creaciones hist6ricas. La
lectura de referencias de Ia tradici6n literaria y teatral. como el mito de Prometeo
en el c3so de C'tindua y de Test/go de las ruinas. constituye una de sus mas
frecuentes metodologiaode trabajo Rolf Abderhalden escogiola version de Heiner
r. 1[iller. en Ia que Prometeo, ;l!lte Ia noticia de su liberacion, sufre Ia separacion del
~q uila que adiario cltNora su higado y temeno poder vivir sin ella Como lo explica
el director de Mapa Teatro "en este tuming point clc Ia fabulo es que se genera
d 'centro de t~;mor' de Ia historia P10meteo le tiene mas miulo a Ia libertad que
al pajaro" El texto, aiiade Abderhalden, "funciono ta l como funciona un teady
made Llll objeto encontrado que es sacado de su contexto para ser interpretado
yre-significado par una mul tiplicidad de lecturas, de miradas yde gestos. Amedida
que el te, to se leia, cada uno iba reinventando su propio relata, reactualizando el
texto origina l ·; rcescribiendo suprc;'io milo. "
Fin !mente, e•1trc las 1r:is destacadas rreacioneo perforn:aticas C'llombianas es
necesario mencionar El circa de pulgas(1994-2000). de Maria Fernanda Cardoso.
Esta obra es unica en su genera. aun cuando se llaya apoyado en una antigua
tradicion. Cardoso procedia del territorio de Ia escultura, aspecto que otorg6 a su
trabajo cualidades y orientaciones rad icalmente diferentes Par eso El circa de
pulgas, a pesar de las nociones de vitalidad que envuelve, de lo efimero o
transitorio que puede ser en su funcionamiento, se comprende tam bien como una
corporalidad que no esta presente en los trabajos de los primeros.
Hincapie. Abderha lden y Cardoso comparten el interes par dirigirse a los universos
mlnimos, alo microscopico yaIa puntual. A~imismn comparten su alusion al contexto
colombiano, no obstante carecer de un planteamiento directo o una imagen
identificable como tal. En el caso de El circa de pulgas, esta alusi6n se comprende en
relacion con trabajos anteriores, en los que Ia artista trabaj6 con animales disecados
y otros elementos para abordar temas de Ia identidad y del conflicto en Colombia.
Como ha aclarado Ia propia Cardoso "Ia que me interesaba era que las casas fueran
reales y ta l vez asi llegue a los animales [.. ] A finales de los ochentas y comienzos
de los noventas se vivieronlos momentos mas fuertes del terrorismo provenientes del
narcotrafico en Colombia. Era Ia epoca de Pablo Escobar, de las bombas en el edificio
del DAS y en el Centro Comercial de Ia calle 93, entre otros aetas casas que fueron
muy reales ymuy dolorosas. Parte de rni confrontacion de exhibir ani males reales era
que no podlamos negar Ia realidad, no Ia pod lamas ignorar. "9
El circa de pulgas, asr como los trabajos y los artistas antes mencionados, se
encuentran entre las obras referenciales que conforman una historia del
performance en Colombia. Hoy el genera incluye agrupaciones como Helena
Producciones, a cuya iniciativa junto al artista Wilson Dlaz se debe Ia existencia
de un Festivallnternacional de Performance en Ia ciudad de Cali desde 1998.
La ruptura con los discursos centralistas Ia produjeron Debora Arango, Feliza Bursztyn,
Doris Salcedo, BeatrizGontale , Alejandro Obregon y los performances de Antonio Caro,
Jonier Marin y Rosemberg Sandoval. Aunque estos artistas, y muchos otros, realizaron
obras importantes y destacados performances, este breve texto esta basado en las
sigmficativas contribuciones y Ia carrera tragicamentc corta de Marfa Teresa Hincapie
(1954-20081
Nota del editor Grotowsky fue un director teatral palaeo, mejor conocido par sus
producciones de vanguardia y el desarrollo del "teatro pobre", que buscaba facilitar una
interacci6n mils cercana entre el actor y Ia audiencia eliminando el vestuario, Ia
escenograffa y las luces.
"No" Ia "Noh") es una forma de teatro japones cuya tradici6n data del siglo XIVy combind
drama, danza, musica ypoesia. En el No, los actores son entrenados individualmente, pero
nunca ensayan en grupo antes deactuar. Asi se estimula Ia interacci6n espontanea entre
elias. El No ha influido grandemente formas dramaticas japonesas posterior~s como el
Kabuki y el Butoh.
4 Fragmento de Ia segunda presentaci6n de Ondina en el Festivallnternacional deTca t10 de
Manizales, 1985.
5 C0ncuelo Pabon, ,1ctns ric .1ai.,~I.Jc;Jn, /nn:stigxion,,s sabre Jrto CO!'Ii't'',"!!'1r'·'·7. Prl,\'f'i.t J
Pull iqJno (Bogota L'llrHsterio de Cultwa, ZOOGI. 79.
6 l ' wrl~a en lengt.a Ard,vac signrfir<J " 1: luqar a dor .de ~e vc1 d morir'.
Torm: Pr• utrlildll·i I'Gr el clmnra twqn HcinL:r ~ 1 u ll e r p&u ref r;rir e~, iii rwlo 1' \ j)ICS vo qtoc
n lr:tluic une~ te:;si6n ,,n ia oiJra tr.~rtr al, que fiolf ,\IJcl c'halrlen rl, :;pia.,, '' :il r:vplica r:iur'
d~ Ia "itt..r ;P,~ en rL:~ a~ i6i1 Ct'~1 :J11l;r,
B Rolf Air lcri'3Uen. TPxto inrdi~o ar~riJiicar ~ •. enla re/sta de Ia. SAB, E~rue lii de ilrtrsdt Bogota
9 I\Ioria Fernand'l Cardoso en r ntreviqil con OiP.fiOGarzon. Otras 1aces otro Jrtl' !Bogota
Ediciones Pl<meta, 20051. 160- 161.
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305
Artists Index
Page numbers in English are listed first I page numbers in Spanish are listed second.
Ada I (51. 79 I 239)
b. Utuado, Puerto Rico 1948; New York City 1969;
lives in New York City
Alfaro, Luis (53)
b. Los Angeles, Californ ia 1961, lives in Los Angeles
Allora & Calzadilla (56, 79, 194 I 239, 287)
Active San Juan Puerto Rico 1995-Present
(Jennifer AI lora, b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1974
and Guillermo Calzadilla, b. Havana, Cuba 1971 I
Altamirano, Carlos (39, 163-164 I 275)
b. San Carlos. Chile 1954; lives in Santiago, Chile
Alvarado, Antonio (35, 39, 204, 206 I 292)
b. Panama 1938
Alves, Maria Thereza (49)
b. Sao Paulo, Brazil1961, lives in Berlin, Germany
Alys, Francis (49. 51, 52, 53. 54, 55, 56, 147)
b. Antwerp, Belgium 1959; Mexrco City, Mexico 1990;
lives in Mexico City and London
Amorales, Carlos (53)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1970; lives in Me. ico City
Los Anthropolocos (50, 74 I 738)
Active United States 1991 - present
(Richard A. Lou, b. San Diego, California and
Robert J Sanchez. b. Austin, Texas 1952)
Apuy, Otto (35, 44, 208 I 293)
b. Canas. Guanacaste. Costa Rica 1949; San Jose.
Costa Rica 1970; Barcelona 1974; lives in Costa Rica
Arte Calle (46, 182-183, 190/281. 285)
Active Havana, Cuba 1986-1988
(Core members included Ivan 1\lvarez. Hugo Azcuy
Castillo, Eric Gomez Galan, Offil Echeverria Alderete,
Ernesto Leal Basilio, Aldo "Maldito" Damian ~·il encndez
Lopez. Ariel Serrano. and Pedro A. Vizcaino Martinez)
Arte Destructivo (17, 85, 87 ,243)
(Kenneth Kemble with Enrique Barilari. Jor[le Lopez
Anaya, Jorge Roiger, Antonio Segui, ami Silvia Torrt:;,
and Luis Alberto Wells)
Artigas, Gustavo (57)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1910; lives in rvlrxico Crt\
As co (15, 27-31. 68-70I 230, 235)
~~:: t rve Los ."\n g ~::lr~ s. Ca liforni1 1970- 1987
:~o:e m8mbcrs i n ci c~d e d Harr1 Gamboa. J<. Gror1k,
Willie Herron, Patsi Valde1. and Humberto Sandova l)
Azurdia, Margarita (a.k.a. Margot Fanjul)
177. 206. 207 I 29:1)
b. Antigua, Guatemilla 1931, d. Guatemala Crty 1998
D'Arango, Teowald (36)
b. Venezuela 1945
Baez, Josefina (202 I 291)
b. La Romana, Dominican Republic; New York City
1981; lives in New York City
Barboza, Diego (30, 38,116-117,123,125- 1261
254-255, 257-258)
b. Maracaibo, Venezuela 1945; d. Maracaibo 2003
Barrio, Artur (26, 67,109, 112, 123 I 234,251 - 252, 257)
b. Porto. Portugal1945; Rio de Janeiro. Brazil1955;
lives in Rio de Janeiro
Bedia, Jose (34, 189 /285)
b. Havana, Cuba 1959; Mexico 1991; United States
1993; lives in Miami, Florida
Bonachea, James (55, 194 I 287)
b. Sancti Spiritus, Cuba 1997; lives in Havana, Cuba
Bonino, Jorge (19. 24. 86-87I 243)
b. Villa Maria, Cordoba, Argentina 1935; d. Cordoba 1990
Bony, Oscar (21, 23, 90-92, 961 245-2 6)
b. Posadas, Argentina 1941, d. Buenos Aires.
Ar[lentina 2002
Border Art Workshop I Taller de Arte Fronterizo
(BAW/TAF) (15. 42, 44, 48, 50, 55. 73-74 I 230, 237- 238)
Active Sdn Diego, Califor n1a 1984 Present
(founding members included David Avdlos. Victor
Ochoa. Michael Schnorr, Isaac Artenstein. Jude
Eberhart. Guillermo G6mez-Peiia. and Sard Jo Berman)
Borges, Jacobo (1 4, 24.117,120- 121/230,254,
256, 259)
b. Venezuela 1931: Paris 1951-1955; lives in New York City
Brugnoli, Francisco (164. 178I 274. 280)
b. Santiago, Chile 1934; lives in Santiago
Bruguera, Tania (~ 6 . 50. 53. ~.4 . 56, 130. 181. HC.
190, 194-195/282--783, 285- 287)
b. Havdrla, CuiJa 1968; li 1 2 ~ 111 Cllicauo. l;'·il:Ji. il',d
HiW<Jna. r ubil
Buendia, Felipe (1 1.152 ' 27 1)
b. Peru
Burga, Teresa (28. 1601
b. Peru 1939
Bustamante, Maris (35. 19. 40. 51. 11.1- 135. 1~5.
151 /263,267, 270)
h. Mexico Cr ty, Mexico 1949: lrves in Mex1co City
Bustamante, Nao (49. 50, 52, 53. 76 .' 238)
b. San Joaquin Valley, California: lives in New York
CADAIColectivo Acciones de Arte I Art Actions
Collective (15, 34, 38, 41. 42,164- 171.175/230.275-
278, 280)
Active Santiago. Chile 1979- 1983
(originally comprised of Lotty Rosenfeld. Juan Castillo.
Fernonrlo BJicells. Riilrl Zuritil. iind Diamr~lii Eltit)
Calderon, Miguel (53)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1971; lives in Mexico City
Campos Pons, Maria Magdalena (184 I 283)
b. Matanzas. Cuba 1959; Boston. Massachusettes
1991, lives in Boston
Cano, Maria Teresa (42, 216 I 297)
b. Antioquia, Colombia; lives in New York City
Cardenas, Miguel- Angel (28)
b. Espinal, Colombia 1934; the Netherldn ds 1962;
lives in the Netherlands
Cardoso, Maria Fernanda (53, 221 -222 I 299)
1
b. Colombia 1963: lives in Sydney, Australia
Carnevale, Graciela (23, 92- 931 246)
b. Marcos Juarez. Argentina 1942; lives in Rosario,
Argentina
Carreira, Ricardo (20, 89 I 244)
b. Buenos Aires. Argentina 1942; d. Buenos Aires 1993
Castaneda, Consuelo (190 I 285)
b. Havana, Cuba 1958; l1 ves in IVIiami. Florida
Castillo, Juan (35. 163. 165, 171 /275--276. 278)
b.lintufagdsta, Ch il ~; 1952: Eur ope 198·1: 1
:'e"in
Stockholm, Swcdr·n
Castro, Humberto (190 I 285)
IJ. Havana. Cuba 1957; Paris, France 1989- 1999;
lives in Florida
de Carvalho, Flavio (107 / 251)
IJ. Rio de Janeiro. Br<~z il1899: cLSao Paulo, Brazil 1973
Ceballos, Sandra (194I 287)
h. Gua•lt:lr'amo. Cu!~ CJ 1961. live: i•1 Ha,ana. Cd c1
Chilindron, Marta i5Q)
b. Buenns ,\Ire, _,\ r ~!t! n tiq a 1~'i1 , ~ ! ·'.'.' ·, .., :- rit·,- 1969:
Lvr sin N2'.'/ Yu l
Clark, Lygia IF lH/2. 24. 2d. 56. 107- i08 112.
122 1 !30, 23 \, 751-252, 257i
b. Br:ln Horimntc. GrJ;il 1920; cl. Rio de JanPiro, Braz ;~ 1988
Colectivo Sociedad Civil (56. 152- 1:i3, 159,' 273)
,\cti\ e Llrn<l. rl' r ~: 2000 -pre:.eni
(Femando Brvce. Grrstavn Buntinx r laurliii Coca. Lui5
Garcia Zapatero. Juan Infante. Nat·llid lguirie'. JorgL
Sa Iuzar. En,iL' SJntislcban. S u·, i!: ~a Tc,' il .. ALr:
Vald1via. Sandr d Vent111o)
Colo, Papo (27. 32. 33. 40. 41 . 42.58-59.68.72-73.
82/ 234. 237. 241I
b. PtwrliJ de Tit.rrd, Puerto Rrco 13'!7: ~~ c :: Yor ~ Cr ~;
1970s; lives in New York City
l
l Costa, Eduardo (14, 20, 21, 25, 30, 40, 41, 50, 63, 88,
1011230, 233, 244, 249)
b. Buenos Aires. Argentina 1940; New York City 1967;
Buenos Aires 1971, Rio de Janeiro 1978;
New York City 1981; lives in Buenos Aires.
Rio de Janeiro, and New York City
l The Cucano Group (97 I 247)
Active Rosario. Argenti na 1979-1983
(Guillermo Giampietro, Alejandro Beretta.
Carlos Ghioldi, Carlos Luchesse)
l Cuenca, Arturo (47, 190, 192-193 I 285-286)
b. Holguin, Cuba 1955; New York City 1991-2006;
lives in Miami, Florida
Cuevas, Joseluis (22, 138, 140, 142 /265- 266)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1934; lives in Mexico City
Culture Clash (42)
Active San Francisco, California 1984-present
(Richard Montoya. Ric Salinas. and Herbert Siguenza)
Cyclona (Robert Legoretta) (25, 27, 68, 70 I 234- 235)
b. El Paso. Texas 1952; lives in Whittier, Cal ifornia
Davidovich, Jaime (35, 67-68I 234)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1936; New York City 1963;
lives in New York City
Delgado, Angel (48, 190. 193- 194 /285-287)
b. Havana, Cuba 1965; lives in 1\1exi co City
DelRe, Alexander (51-53)
b. Santiago, Chile 1961; lives in Santiago
Diaz, Luis (28. 206- 207 I 292- 293)
b. Guatemala City, Guatemala 1939; lives in
Guatemala City
Diaz, Maria Adela (55 57. 21 0-2 11 '294-295)
r G u~tem~l ~ 1973; lil'v>in Guc1temab Ci t,.
Gua ten1ala and Los Angell's. Ca!i fPrlllil
Dittborn, Eugenio t37. 43. Jut, ·166. 1i51275-276. ~so ,
b. SJ:lliJgo ,!l CliiiL 13:3.li\t:s in Sil:lti.l 0!l
Downey, Juan (15. 21- 25. 2/- 30. bl - 62. 67, 81,
171- 173.175, 179.' 230. 232,234, 241.278,280-281)
b. Santiago de Chile 1940; Barcelona, Madrid. Paris
196 1; Wa hington D.C. 1955- 1969: NL .v York City
1969- 197; th<~ Ama_,m 197G- 1 77:d l~e ;, Yori:Ci~,·
1993
Duarte, Benjamin (1 84 .' 281)
b. Caonao. Cuba 1900; d. 1°7 ~
Duarte, Rogerio (23. 104 .' 250)
b. Ub ira. Brazil1939
Dulzaides, Felipe (194 I 287)
b. Ha ana, Cuba 1965; lives in San Francisco. California
Dum it Estevez, Nicolas (202 I 291 I
b. Santiago de los Treinta Cabal leros. Dominican
Rt. puiJiic 1967, live;, irr Nev. ;,Jrk Cit·,
Ehrenberg, Felipe (24, 26, 29, 139-1 40, 141, 143-
144,1501266-267, 269)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1943; England 1968-1972;
lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Eielson, Jorge Eduardo (15, 25, 28, 30, 33, 46, 152,
154. 156, 159, 161I 230,2711
b. Lima, Peru 1924; Rome, Italy 1951 ; d. Milan, Italy 2006
The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) (54)
Active 1994- Present
(Ricardo Dominguez. Carmin Kara sic, Brett Stalbaum,
and Stefan Wray)
Eltit, Diamela (35, 163, 165, 179 I 275-276)
b. Santiago, Chile 1949: lives in Santiago
Escalona, Maria Elena (53)
b. Cuba: Spain 1991
Escari, Raul (20)
b. Buenos Aires. Argentina 1944; Paris.
France 1967-1 997; Montevideo, Uruguay 1997-2003;
lives 111 Buenos Aires
Escobedo, Helen (140- 141, 150 1266)
b. ~. 1e..: ico City, ~.l ex ica 1934: Landor, England 1951-
1954; Mexico Ci ty 1954-1957: Sweden 1957-1959:
lives in Mexico Cit
Escombros (47, 98I 247)
Active Buenos Aires. ArfJentina 1988- present .
(Jose AItuna. Claudio Castro, Horacia D'Aiessandro,
David Edward, Adriana Fayad, Luis Pa1os.
and Hector Puppo)
Ettedgui, Marco Antonio (36, 38,11 -\- 117,123,
126, 129- 130 i 254-~55, 257-259)
b. Cardcas. Vene uela 1958; d. Caracas 1981
Evangelista, Roberto (32)
b. !Jan 1.1\ Jln~ lzn :·as. Brad I ,'a~ .:1L1J:~J1. .:
The Fabulous Nobodies 151 i
Bucn.o· /\ire'. Argcn•!na 1~9)
~c, ; ·,e 19~.1
Favario, Eduardo 123. 92- 93 2 ·1~ 1
b. Bo,.lrio. 1\rger~li ru 19j9: u. Uarke. i\rgentir:a 19 /S
Feij6o, Samuel (25. 184. 283)
b. San Juan de Ia' ·rea r ~. Cu ;r 1914; d. Santa Clara,
C r: ~• 1 1992
Felguerez, Manuel (~ 3 . :n 1-iO/2C5-266)
b. 7ar'llt:ca·. r lcxicn 1928: ltv :. in , lexica Cll·;
Felipe, Liliana (36, ~I. 48 I
b. Cordoba, Argentina 1954; tviexico City 1976;
lives in lvlexico City
Ferrari, Leon (23, 37, 46)
b. Buenos Aires. Argentina 1920: Sao Paulo, Brazil
1976-1991: Buenos Aires 1991; lives in Buenos Aires
Ferrer, Rafael (24- 26, 65-66, 70 I 233- 234, 236)
b. Santurcc. Puerto Rim 1933; Phililrlelphia 1966; lives
in Greenport. Long Island, New York
Figueroa, Dionys 1202 I 236, 291I
b. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 1956; New York
City 1970-1976; Puerto Rico 1976; lives in Puerto Rico
Finck, Carlos (29, 143, 144/267)
b. Mexico
Foundation for the Totality (22, 116 /232)
Active New York City
(Rolando Peiia, Juan Downey, Manuel Quinto. Jaime
Barrios. Waldo Diaz Balart, Jose Rodriguez Soltero,
Vicky Larrain, Carmen Beachart, and others)
Frente 172.82/237. 241)
Active Puerto Rico 1977
(Luis Hernandez Cru1, Lope Max Diaz. Antonio Navia,
and Paul Camacho)
Frente Cultural Abril1965 (199)
Active Dominican Republic 1965
(Ma imo Aviles Blanda. Ramon Oviedo, Ada Balcacer.
Jose Cestero. and Silvana Lora)
Freytes, Teofilo (44, 71 - 72 / 236)
b. Mexico City. Me~ico 1953; Miami, Florida 1968-
1984: San Juan, Puerto Rico 1984; lives in San Juan
Fusco, Coco (15, 49, 53, 75-77 I 230, 238)
b. New York City, New York 1960: lives in New York City
Gaitan, Maria Elena (55)
b. East Los Angeles, California 1949: lives in California
Galeria DUPP (Desde Una Pragmatic a
Pedagogical (57, 194 i286)
Active Havana, Cuba
(First group) 1989-1990 Alexander Arrechea.
Dagoberto Rodriguez. Diane lis Perez Travieso.
Tania Rodrigue2. Tania Alina Paredes,
Mafia del Pilar Re/CS, Fernand Rodriguezamllbra 11!m
~, 1iran a: (Third grourl 1997-2001 Beberly ~.1o j ena.
Yoan CJpnte, lntr Ht: rr~ ;i nd c . Juan R1verr. David
S a r .l itiJ~ . OnrAr 1· lore n~. D<:vier d ~ l [)ago, Rwl?.n
rc;•: c~ . Yun;s ~.h r i :'o, A 1 · ! " ~r,~ c r Guerra. ~ .'!Jyin,I ·P ,
,k >f) ErHilio Fuentes Fons,oca (Jeff). Will redo Pt ie'o.
i.lich2l Riws. Ivan Carol8, ·ro, ,ani f\ial<lQtin. Glenda
Loon 1ndJarnc·" Btt' Jr he:l
Galindo, Regina Jose (15, 55-57. 204-ZO:i. iuS.
210-211. 230 I 29.!-2951
b. Guatemala City. Guatemala 1974; lives in Gualernal,
Gallardo, Marylin (?02 I 190- 201I
b. Dominican Republic
Gamboa Jr., Harry !G8- 70, 235)
b. Fnst Los Angele<>. California 1951; lives in Losf1ngeiP"
Garciandia, Flavio (34. 189 I 285)
b. Caibarien, Cuba 1954; lives in 1onterrc·,. tde:, ico
Garcia Uriburu, Nicolas (23, 27. 64 I 233, 249)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1937; lives in Buenos Aires
Garcia, Fernando (39. 40,183, 187- 188 I 287, 284)
b. Havana, Cuba 1945: u. Miam1. Florida 1989
307
 Garcia, Julio (a.k.a. Pirosmani) 134. 185 I 283)
b. Cuba; active Havana. Cuba 1980s
GAS- TAR (Grupo de Artistas Socialistas--Taller
de Arte Revolucionario) I CAPataco (Colectivo
de Arte Participativo- Tarifa Comun) (47. 97 I 247)
Active Buenos Aires, Argentina 1980s
Geiger, Anna Bella (28)
b. Rio de Janeiro. Brazil1933; lives in Rio de Janeiro
Gimenez, Carlos (123 I 257)
b. Argentina; Venezuela 1968
Ginzburg, Carlos 127, 30, 96, 98 I 246-247)
b. La Plata, Argenitna 1946; traveled the world
1972-1982; lives in Paris, France
Goeritz, Matias (137, 138, 146 I 264-265, 268)
b. Gdansk (Danzig). Poland 1915; Spain 1940-1 949;
Guadalajara. Mexico 1949-1954; Mexico City, Mexico
1954; d. Mexico City 1990
G6mez-Pefia, Guillermo (39, 46, 49, 54, 73-76 I
230, 237- 238)
b. Mexico City. Mexico 1955; US 1976; lives in
San Francisco. California
Gonzalez-Torres, Felix 133-34,40-41.49,70-71.
76. 187- 188 I 235- 236. 238. 284)
b. Guaimaro. Cuba 1957; Spain then Puerto Rico 1971-
1979; New York City 1979-1996; d. Miami. Florida 1996
Gory (Rogelio Lopez Marin) 134. 189 I 285)
b. Havana. Cuba 1953; Miami. Florida 1991;
lives in Miami
GRAV (Groupe de rechereche d'art visuel)
(17-20. 61 I 230. 232)
Active Paris. France 1960-1 968
(core members included Horacia Garcia Rossi.
Julio L ~ Pare, FrJn~oi s ~, lor;cllet, Fr<lllCr~co Sobrir~''.
Joel Stein. ar- i Y1-aral)
Greco, Alberto (1l17--19, 63. 85-SG. 100' 230.
232, 243)
b. Buenos Aires. Argentir'a 1931; Paris 1954-1 956;
d. BarcelonJ, Spain 1965
Grippo, Victor 128. 9-1- 95 ' 246)
b. Buenos Aires. Argentina 1936; d. Bueno' Aires 2002
Grobe!, Lourdes 141. 144)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1940; lives in ~·1 e~ ico Cr ty
Gronk (Giugio Nicandro) 125. ~6. 68 -70. 23-1)
b. Los .1\ngeles. California 1954; lives in Los Angeles
Grupo de Arte Callejero IGAC) (52, 98 I 248)
Acti•.1e Buenos Aires, Argen imJ1997-Presrnt
(Pablo Ares. Violeta Bernasconi. Lorena Bossi, Vanesa
Bossi. Mariana Corral. Carolina Golder. Alejandro Merino.
Lorena Merlo, Leandro Yazurlo and Rafael Leona)
JOB
Grupo Chaclacayo 142. 44, 154-155 I 271)
Active Lima, Peru 1983- 1990
(Raul Avellaneda, Helmut Psotta. Sergio Zevallos)
Grupo Civico (45)
Active Havana, Cuba 1987
(Ricardo Cfvico. director; with Chaito. Tabaquito.
Douglas, Arturo, Cindy, Madona. Corberto. Miguelito.
and others)
Grupo Enema (57, 1941 287)
Active Havana. Cuba 1999-2004
(Pavel Acosta. David Beltran, James Bonachea,
Alejandro Cordobes, Zenia Couzo, Edgar Echevarria,
Lino Fernandez. Nadiesda lnda. Janler Mendez. Fabian
Peiia, Hanoi Perez. Rubert Quintana. Lazaro Saavedra.
Adrian Soca)
Grupo Haga 143)
Active Buenos Aires. Argentina 1985
(Liliana Maresca and Ezequiel Furguiele)
Grupo Hexagono, Equipo de Creacion Colectiva
141, 190/285)
Active Havana, Cuba 1982- 1985
(Consuela Castiliiecla. Humberto Castro. Angel
Sebastian Elizondo, Antonio Eligio Fernandez [Tonel].
Abigail Garcia Fayat and Marfa Elen<J ~ orera)
Grupo al Margen (40)
Active Santiago, Chile 1982
(Juan Castillo b. Antofagasta, Chile 1952; Europe
1984; lives in Stockholm, S\•,eden and Ximena Prieto
b. Santiago, Chile 1947; lives in Santiago)
Grupo Mira 1145 /267)
Active Mexico City, Mexico 1977-1982
(Arnulfo Aquino Casas. Eduardo Garduno. Melesio
Galvan. Rebeca Hidalgo. SJtil Martinez. Salvador
Paleo. Silvia Paz Paredes. Jorge Perez Vegd)
Grupo Provisional P6. i83. 190. 194 - 19~ / 2 82 .
285. 287)
. cti1 e HiJV,lilJ. Cuba 19HB 1989
(;,lcjilmlru 1,cust1. Franci:.1.1La;trd. [Ji ex : ~; f·~e; ,o;i ;ll'j
Ca rl o~ Rourigu8. Cardenas)
Grupo SEMEFO (Servicio Medico
Forense/Forensic Medical Service) (51)
Ac tive :Lxico City, Mexico 1990-ca.1994
(Core 111e111 ers include 1Trresa 1argoi1Ps, Anurn
Am ullo. Carlos Lope1. Juan Manuel Perncis, Juan Luis
G.1rcra Lavaleta. Vrctor Basurto. Antonio l'viaceclo.
~. nil,ii l PoiiuPI.1s. Monica Siilcido)
Grupo Suma (1·14, 200/267, 290)
Active Mexico City. l\:1exico 1976-1982
(Oscar Aguilar Olea. Jose Barbosa. Paloma Diaz Abreu.
Rene Freire. Oliverio Hinojosa. Armand ina Lozano.
Gabriel Macotela, Ernesto Molina. Alfonso Mora/a.
Cesar Nuriez. Hirman Ramirez. Armando Ramos. Mario
Rangel Faz. Santiago Rebolledo, Jesus Reyes Cordero.
Ricardo Rocha, Jaime Rodriguez. Arturo Rosales.
Patricia Salas. Alma Valtierra. Luis Vidal and
Guadalupe Zob<HIO)
Guimaraes, Luis Alphonsus 126, 111 1252)
b. Brazi l
Gurrola, Juan Jose 118, 22, 30, 139, 1401 265)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1935; d. Mexico City 2007
Gurrola, Juan Jose with Juan Vincente Melo
Juan Garcia Ponce, and Carlos Monsivais '
118, 1391265)
Active Mexico City, Mexico 1963
Gutierrez- Solano, Carlos (185 I 283)
b. Havana, Cuba 1947; San Francisco. California
1970s; lives in New York City
Guzman, Daniel (50)
b. Mexico City, Me ico 1964; lives in lv1exico City
Los Hartos (138 I 265)
Active Mexico City, Mexico 1961
(Matias Goeritz. Pedro Friedeberg, Chelo Aba scal de
Lemionet, Agripina Maquda, Benigno Alvarado. Kati
Horna. Jesus Reye s Ferreria, Octavia Asta, Francisco
Avalos. andJose Luis Cuevas)
Hadad, Astrid 148)
b. Chetumal, Quintana Roo. IVIexico;
lives in Me ico City, Mexico
Hernandez Amezcua, Jose Antonio 129. 144 '267)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1947; live. in Mexico City l
Hincapie, Maria Teresa (15, 42. 45. 47-48, 50, 52-
53,214-220. 222. 230 I 297-299)
b. Armenia, Colombia 1956; d. Bogota. Colombia 2008
Hoffbauer, Patricia (53)
b. Rio de Janeiro. Brazil
Imagen de Caracas 124. 116. 120- 122. 132 /254, 256)
Active Caracas. Venezuela 1968
(Included Jacnbo Borges as mtistic director, lnocente
Palarios as producer and. among others Josefinil
Jorcliin. Milrio Robles. Juan Pedro Pos ni. Manuel
b pinozil. JoseVicente A1uar. Luksrc, F rc~nci " co HunLl.
..\leJCHldro Otero, L a riJ ~ Cru, Ore,, Jorue Chrrrno:;,
Francr1 Donda. Do:1ald M<,yerston. Juan Santilna.
Antonro Llerandi, Roberto Siso. Fernando Toro. Ai1aro
Boscan. Ramon Unda. Adriano Gorualez Leon.
Salvador Garrnendia, Sergio Antillano. JIIJ Cruxent.
Manuel Caballero. Ca trpolir~n Ova lies. Josefina
Urdaneta. Hector Mujica. Ruben Ntu1ez. Roberto
G11evaril. BPigi.-'1 Rorlrig'rez. Gmrl Leufofl. Je,·L
Tenreiro. Manuel Espinoza. Manuel Caballero. Miguel
Arroyo. ami Per an Erminy)
Irizarry, Carlos 135. 71 I 236)
b. Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico 1938; New York City ;mel
Puerto Rico until1972; Puerto Rico 1972; New York
State Federal Prison 1979- 1983; li eo in San Juan.
Puerto Rico
Jaar, Alfredo 115.34, 39, 45, 171 - 172. 174 177 I
230, 277- 281)
b. Santiaqo, Chile 1956; New York City 1981;
lives in New York City
 Jacoby, Roberto (14, 20-23, 56, 62-63, 88-90 I
230, 233, 244-245)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1944; lives in Buenos Aires
Jaffe, Lee (26 I 252)
b. US 1950; lives in Los Angeles, California
Jodorowsky, Alejandro (14, 17-19,22, 138-1 40,
144 I 230, 265, 2671
l b. lquique, Chile 1929; Paris 1952153-1967; Mexico
City, Mexico 1967-1975; lives in Barcelona, Spain
Jurado, Conchita (a.k.a. Don Carlos Balmori)
(137 I 2641
b. Mexico 1866; d. Mexico City, Mexico 1931
Kacero, Fabio
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1961, lives in Buenos Ai res
Kemble, Kenneth (17 . 85, 87, 100 I 243, 248)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1923; d. Buenos Aires 1997
KMAN (42, 180, 182-183. 187 I 282, 284. 287)
b. Placetas. Cuba 1957; Kendall, Florida 1970s;
lives in Kendall
Kurtycz, Marcos (46, 141, 150 /266)
b. Pielgrzymowice. Pszc1yna. Poland 1934; 1968
Tampico, Mexico; d. Mexico City, Mexico 1996
Labat, Tony (15, 33-36. 39,183-186.194. 196/230.
282-283, 287- 288)
b. Havana, Cuba 1951. Miami, Florida 1976;
lives in San Francisco, California
Lagunas, Jessica (55, 210-2 11 I 294-295)
b. Managua, Nicaragua 1971, New York City 2000;
lives in New York City
Lamelas, David (19, 21, 27. 67 I 234. 257)
b. Buenos Ai res. Argentina 1946; London, England
1968- 1977; lives in Buenos Aires and Los An()Pies.
c ~ llfornia
de Loof. Sergio (47. 51)
b. Buenos AirPs.•~rg ent inil; li:es in Buenos A1res
Leppe, Ca rlos 1 : ~ -3U. 33. 35 -3G. i 62 -164 ,' 275)
b. Santlano. Chile 1952; live' 111 Chile
Lopez, Alejandro (46. 190.1 92.195 ' 285- 287)
b. Havam1. Cuba 1963; lives in Ne v York C1ty
Lopez, Anibal (aka A- 1 53167) (53. 55 -56,21 2, 295)
b. Guatemala 1964
Lora, Silvan o (15. 17. 31. 58. 199-201 1 230. 290)
b Ormi11!ran Republic 1931; d. 2003
Lou, Richard A. (46. 50. 73-74 I 237)
b. San Diego, Cailforllla; lives in MemphiS, Tennessee
Loyola, Juan (40, 53,11 6 117,123.1 26.129 1254-
255. 257- 259)
b. Caracas, Venezuela 1952; d. Calia Ia Mar, Vargas,
Venezuela 1999
Lublin, Lea (24)
b. Argentina
Maier, Leopolda (15, 19, 21, 27,39-40,72 / 230, 237)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1937; London, England
1961-1977; New York 1977-1983; Dominican
Republic 1983; lives in the Dominican Republic
Manuel, Antonio (23, 26, 29,102,104- 107,1 12 I
250-251)
b. Ave las de Caminho, Portugal1947;
lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Mapa Teatro (42, 220, 222 I 298-299)
Founded 1984 Bogota, Colombia
(Heidi, Elizabeth, and Rolf Alberhalclen, founders)
Mar'io (37, 145I 266)
Active Mexico City, Mexico 1978- 1980
(Sebastian, Magali Lara, Manuel Marin, Gilda Castillo,
Mauricio Guerrero, and Alejandro Olmedo)
Maresca, Liliana (43, 49-51, 98-99 I 247)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1951, d. Argentina 1994
Margolies, Teresa (54-56)
b. Cuilac<ln, Sinaloa, Mexico 1963; lives in Mexico
City, Me ico
Marmolejo, Maria Evelia (39, 216 I 297)
b. PrJdera. Valle, Colombia
Martinez, Cesar (52)
b. Me;.ico City, Mexico 1962; lives in Mexico City
Martinez, Daniel Joseph (50, 52. 78- 80 I 239)
b. Los Angeles, California 1957; lives in Los Angeles
Martorell, Antonio (43, 72, 79 1 236-237)
b. Santurce, Puerto Rico 1939; lives in Puerto Rico and
New York City
Masotta, Oscar (21 . 22. 63. !:5. 88. 96 I 233.
: 43- 241, 246)
b. Bur·'1o' Aire;, Arnentincl 1930; Eu10pe 1974;
rl Barcelonc,, Spain 197
Mateo, Alonso (JoseLuis) (16, ~ 7. 190. 19J ·2P5
b. Hilvana. Cuba 196d; •1cxicu 1990-2006;
l!1es 111 fvliarni, Florida
Malta-Clark, Gordon (27 . 28. 30. 33)
b. NeN York City, New York 1943, d. Ne'N York City 1978
Mayer, Monica (1 45, 151 I 267- 268. 2,0)
L. lvi8XICO ~ it\·. f\lexico 195~; lives in iV1eAico Cit)
Meireles, Cildo (26-27. 35. 67. 109-112, 123 /234.
252, 257)
b. R1o de Janeiro. Brazil 1948; lives in Rio de Janeiro
Mendieta, Ana (15, 28-33, 36, 38, 40, 46, 82, 180,
183-184,190,194-1951230,282-283, 285-287)
b. Havana. Cuba 1948; Iowa 1961; New York City
1978; d. New York City 1985
Mendive, Manuel (44, 184,190/283, 285)
b. Htlv31Ja, Cuba 1944; li·;es in Havana
Menendez, AIdo "Maldito" (46. 183-184 /282-283)
b. Havana, Cuba 1971; lives in Madrid, Spain
Menicucci, Orlando (24, 200 I 290)
b. San tiago de los Caballeros. Dominican Republic
1949; lives in Santo Oommgo, Dominican Republic
Mercado Velazquez, Freddie (51, 55, 79I 239)
b. Santurce, Puerto Rico 1967; lives in San Juan,
Puerto Ri co
Mercado Cardona, Joaquin (29, 37, 61-62,71-72
I 232. 236-237)
b. San Juan, Puerto Rico 1940; d. San Juan 2003
Meza, Mundo (Edmundo) (68 I 234)
b. 1955; d. California 1985
Microevents (19)
Active Buenos Aires, Argentina 1965
(Marilu Marini, Edgardo Gimenez. Alfredo Rodrigue/
Arias and Miguel Angel Ronda no)
Migliori, Giuliana (53-54, 158 I 272)
b. Peru
Minujin, Marta (14, 18-23,28- 32.34.37-38. 40-
41,43,62. 67, 72.84-85.87 I 230,232, 234.237,2441
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 191\3; lives in Buenos Aires
von Mollendorf, lvonne (27, 160)
b. Peru
Monge, Priscilla (53- 54. 209-210 I 294)
b. San Jose, Costa Rica 1968; lives in San Jose
Montanez Ortiz, Raphael (a.k.a. Ralph Ortiz)
(6, 7, 9, 14, 17, 19, 20, 22-25, 6, 58, 60, 61' 66,
80 /230, 231' 233)
b. Brooklyn, New York 1934; lives in Highland Park.
New Jersey
Monterroso, Sandra (19. 55. 21 0-211/ 294-295)
b. Guatemala 197.!
Monti II a, Manuel i3/ . -d. 48. 201 -LU ~ / 2~ :S -~:J4 i
b. Oa, id. Chir iqui. Panan;a 1950
~8S )
Morales, Jose Antonio 14 i . 15? 1 271 I
b. Peru
La Muerte I19)
Active Buenos Aires. Argen tinJ 1965
(with Dalila Puzwvio, Ruben Santantonin, Zu'enn
Ciordia, Delia Cancela. David Meseiean. Carlo'
Squirru. Edgardo Gimenez and Antonio Berr.il
NADA (43 182-183 '!82)
Active Miomi, Florida 1984-1 985
(core members included Tony Allegro, Adalbcrto
Delgado, Fernando Garcia. Jose GonzalezBoada.
Janet Paparelli, Fred Snitzer)
Navia, Antonio (43)
b. Bayam6n, Puerto Rico 1945; lives in Puerto Rico
309
 The New York Graphic Workshop (67,123 I 234, 257)
Active New York City 1965-1970
(founded by Luis Camnitzer, Jose Guillermo Casti llo
and Liliana Porter) , de Pellerano, Soucy (200 I 290)
No Grupo (33, 36, 40, 126, 134, 143- 145, 150 I 258,
263, 267)
Active Mexico City, Mexico 1977- 1983
(core members included Maris Bu ~tamante,
Melquiades Herrera, Alfredo Nunez, and Ruben
Valencia)
Novoa, Glexis (15, 45, 183- 185, 189, 190, 193, 195 I
230, 283-287)
b. Holguin, Cuba 1964; Monterrey, Me ico 1993-1995;
lives in Miami, Florida and Havana, Cuba
Nucleo-Post-Arte (146 I 267)
Active Mexico City, Mexico 1985-1 990
(Cesar Espinosa, coordinator; Araceli ZC1iiiga, Leticia
Ocharan, Maria Eugenia Guerra, Cosme Ornelas and
Jorge Rosano)
de Ia Nuez, Raul (34. 189 I 285)
b. San Antonio de los Baiios, Cuba 1955; Venezuela
1991; Brazil1993; lives in Miami
Nunez, Ruben (36. 62 I 232)
b. Valencia, Venezuela 1933; lives in Caracas.
Venezuela
Obregon, Roberto (36. 126 I 258)
b. Venezuela 1946
Ochoa, Nela (43, 129 /258)
Oiticica, Helio (14, 18, 19. 23.66-67.102-104.107.
111-112, 123. 234,250-252. 257)
b. Rio de Janeiro. Brazil1937; d. Rio de Janeiru 1980
Okon, Yoshua (53)
b. Mexic0 Ci c','. !'.1t;\iC•I 1970; li\•e:· in Lns.\nu )I~ ·
Oquet, Charo !20 ~ ~91)
h. S;!ntn Or •nnqo. llnmin!r:iln 8rp11b ' i ~ 195~:
;·~ c.l inl\ lnr111. F:Yi ~ l ft
Ortega, luis Felipe 150
b. t\1u <ico Cit i. Mexico 1966; live, 111 ~ io. iro Ci''l
Osorio, Pepon 1-11 -13. ~9. 76 -'238)
b. San !urce. Puerto Rico 1955: Nv:. 'r'n1k f:it·: 137:i.
li\•r s 1n Philadr lphia. Pr.nnsylvrllli<l
Padin, Clemente 126, 3~. 50, 199 /741)1
b. L13cano. Rnch, , Uru. ua,- 1939;
lives in Montevideo. Urunuay
Pape, lygia 122-24. 102, 104, 106--107, 112 I 250-7521
b. Rin de hneirn. 8rozil192~: rl. Rir ric J~i' PJ rn 20n l
Parra, Catalina 142, 45-46. 16~ I 275)
b. Santiago. Chile 1940; lives in New York City
Patino, Adolfo (142)
II. ~.b.ico Cit·;. ~-k ·i •. o 191 \: d. 7005
110
Pazos, luis 129 I 246)
b. La Plata. Argentina
b. Santo Domingo, Oomincan Republic 1928;
lives in Santo Domingo
Pena, Rolando (15, 19. 22.35-36.38,40. 62. 116,
123. 125- 126. 128-129 I 230. 232. 254. 257, 259)
b. Caracas. Vene1uela 1942; New York City, 1963;
lives in Caracas
Peralta Ramos, Federico Manuel 123-24. 27-28 I
248)
b. Mar del Plata. Argentina 1939; d. Buenos Ai res.
Argentina 1992
Perez Monzon, Gustavo (34, 1891 284)
b. Sancti Spiritus. Cuba 1960: lives in Me ico City
Perna, Claudio (31, 33, 35,116.117,124-126,129-
130 I 254- 255. 257-259)
b. Caracas. Venelllela 1938: d. Holguin. Cuba 1997
Peyote y Ia Compafiia (142 I 266)
Active Mexico City, Mexicu 1973- 1975
(Adol io Patino. dirt;ctor and coOJdindtor; Cat ia Rippey.
Rogelio Villarreal. Armando Cri ~ teto)
Pietri, Reverend Pedro IS 1. 79. 83/ 239, ?42)
b. Ponce. Puerto Rico 1944; New York City 19 7; d. on
oirplane from Mexico to Nevv York Ctty 2004
Plate, Roberto (25 / 245)
b. Buenos i\ires. Argentina 1940: Munich. Germany
1963-1966; Paris. France 1970; lives in Pari:;
los Pluralistas 1200 I 289)
Active Dominican Republic 1974
Polvo de Gallina Negra 145.134. 1-11.1 ~5- 1~6 1
262, 266- ~57)
i\r.tive Mrx'co ~;! ;, i'.!Lvir.o 198~ - 1993
(M;1ris Bustilmilntf' an.l ~.1np c.J l l;r-,·• :rl
Por el Ojo i ~!S · : 11 1
Ar' i,c B:te:..J" .-'< 111: . . •~rcwn til n 19t! q -. 199 1
Proceso Pentagono 11 j, /9. 1.: I. ,.i ~ ,'23u. T5-Lb7)
Activ, l\kxicn Cit•, 19/3- 1976
(co;e membm s inc:udPd Victor Lluiio!. Carlo" Finr.k,
Jtr-C1\ n tc ~lio Ht' :T -1:H!LL Aawzcll:l, ~l ~~d ic i J76, F~ ti;H;
Ehrenberg; also OriJmJo ~,1Lnd i c utti)
Quintanilla, R~Lil (-15 ?08 -2fl9 I 791-· ,1 1)
b. Nicara~·n 1954: live in "ilraquil
Restrepo, Alvaro (216, 219 I 297-798)
b. Colomb'a
Restrepo, Jose Alejandro (216, 217. 720 / 297 298)
b. Bogota. Colombia 1959; l1 ves in Bogota
Ripley, Geo (35. 40. 42. 45, 47. 72. 198- 200, 202 I
237, 290)
b. Carilr.a>. Vonr'llela 1950; li• t'\ in Silntn Dnminr1n.
Dominican Republic
Risquez, Diego (36, 38, 62, 117 I 232, 255)
b. Juan Gnego, Isla de Margarita. Venewela 1949
Risuleo, Juan (21, 64, 881 233-244)
b. Argentina
Ritual Art- De (46. 190I 285)
Active Havana. Cuba as Art-De 1988- 1989, then Ritual
Art -De 1989-1991
(Juan-Si Gonzalez. Jorge Crespo, Eliseo Valdez: then
Marco Antonio Abad, Cesar Gonzalez. Adalberto
Roque. Amaury Suarez and others)
Rivera, Nelson (49, 71-72 I 236-237)
b. Fajardo, Puerto Rico 1953; lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Robles, Yi- Yoh 143, 200 I 290-291)
b. Dominican Republic
Rodriguez, Jesusa (36, 41. 46, 48, 55)
b. Mexico City, Mexico 1955; lives in Mexico City
Rodriguez, Juan luis (a.k.a. Rodriguez Sibaja)
(25. 204. 206 I 292)
b. San Jose. Costa Rica 1934
Rodriguez, Rene Francisco (19,1-195! 286- 28/)
b. Holguin. Cuba 1960: live> in Havana. Cubd
Rodriguez Brey, Ricardo (34, 189 I 2G5)
b. Havana. Cuba 1955; GhPnt. Belgium 1991.
lives in Ghent
Rodriguez Cardenas, Carlos (45-46. 190. 192 1
285-286) .
b. Cabaigu.ln. Cuba 1964: N ew Yor ~ 1991,
li es in New Jersey
Rosenfeld, Lotty (15. 35, 163-168, 178 230, 275- 277)
b. Santiago de Chi!e. Chile: lives in Santiago
Rtrano, Eduardo 1?3. 89 1 " 15'
b. Ro\.u<o. !\rgnntin:l
Saavedra, Lazaro 147. 53. 190. 19?.. i 9 "·!;-; L']i 1
i . Hd:<ll'.l. r,t:!\. 1~ [-i, I.:: .. ,1 1...r;·,
Salazar, Juan Javier (5J, i 5'i .' ~ . 21
IJ. Peru
Salcedo, Doris 1217. 2Z 297-~ 98 ,
b. B[)' Olri, roi1Jillbic1%B:: v! 'S;'l 8·'fJ•'Ii
Sanch ez, George Emili o l5l. :_-~ ;
bln, ;\ngeiPS. Caltforni T l'.c:; in (J. . l ,~t r<;.
Sanchez Fogarty, Federico 11 37 .· ~c 4 1
b. Mexico
Santantonin, Ruben (19, 87 88 I Wi
h.l:luenos 1 ires. .l\rqentina 1919; d. Bueno' Aires l9b9
Santisteban, Emilio (48, 55, 157. 159. 161 j 272)
b. Peru 1966; lives in Lima. Peru
Sierra, Santiago (55, 14RI
b Madrid, Spain 1966; Mexico City, Me,!CO 199S:
lives in Mevico Cily
l
Signa x Signa (152 I 271)
Active Peru 1981
(Rossana Ago is, Wiley Ludella, Hugo Salazar del
Alcazar, and Armando Williams)
Siluetazo 113, 41,97 1247)
Buenos Aires, Argentina 1983
(initiated by artists Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores,
and Guillermo Kexel)
Simoes, Thereza 1261 252)
b. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil1941, New York City 1970-
1981, Rio de Janeiro 1981-1996; lives in the Mata
Atlantica, Brazil
Sisco, Elizabeth; Louis Hock; David Avalos
150, 77 I 238)
Active San Diego, California early 1990s-present
Sosa, Antoni eta (15, 25, 36, 38, 43, 116, 122-123,
129 I 230, 254, 256-258)
b. New York City 1940; lives in Caracas, Venezuela
Solo, Leandro (35, 44, 184, 189- 191, 195 I 283-
285, 287)
b. Cienfuegos. Cuba 1956; ~lexica 1988; lives in
Phoenix, Anzona
Solo, Meri<\n (41, 43, 49, 52)
b. Puerto Rico; lives in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania
SU<\rez, Ezequiel (52, 194I 287)
b. Havana, Cuba 1967; lives in Havana
Suarez, Pablo (19, 21, 23, 85, 89-90 / 243, 244, 245,
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1937: lives in Colonia del
Sacramento, Uruguay
Taller de arte y Communicaci6n (TACO)
de Ia Perra Brava (1 42, 143 I 266, 267)
Arrive Mexico City, Mexico 1974
(C ~ s" r Espinos<1. Araceli ZCn1ig.J, anrl Aar(•n Florrs )
Taller de Arte e ldeologia (TAl) (1 41- 142/ 766)
Ar:tivu Mexico City, Mexico 1974
(/Iiberto llijar. Jorge Bustill o'. ,\rrnando Caste l!onos,
i\dri<llla CrJiltreras. Enrique Eche •orriJ, Ce>ar Galvez.
Alberto Hijar, Cecilia Lazcan o. Felipe Leal, Andres de
Luna, Ana Maria IVIartinez. Dolores de las Perias,
Maria Isabel Perez. Rinr Templeton, Atilio Tuis, and
Alberto Vargas)
Taller de lnvestigaci6n Pliistica (TIP) i34, 142I 266!
Active lv1exico Ci ty, Me ico 1974
!formed Ly Isabel Estela Campos, Ariadne Gallardo.
Jose Luis Gutierrez Peria, Cresencio Mendez Gaspar.
Juan Manuel Olivos Campos. Rene Olivos. Jose Luis
So to, and Ignacio Eleazar So to Campos)
Tarcisio, Eloy (48.1 48, 151I 268. 270)
b. Mexico City, Me:,ico 1955; li es in Mexico City
El Teatro Campesino (19, 70)
Founded Delano, California 1965
llrris VilldP.I, founder)
EITechodelaBallena 114,17, 19,114,116,1 18-
119, 121 I 230, 254-2561
Active Caracas, Venezuela 1961-1968
(included, among others Edmundo Aray, Juan
Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Daniel Go!llalez,
Salvador Garmendia, Adriano Gonzalez Leon, Angel
Luque, Gabriel Morera, Damaso Ogaz, Caopolican
Ova lies, and Francisco Perez Perdomo)
Tejada- Herrera, Elena (53-54, 56, 158-159 I 272)
b. Peru; lives in Miami, Florida
Tepito Arte Aca (1 42-143 I 266)
Active Mexico City, Mexico beginning 1973
(Alfonso Hernandez, Daniel Manrique, and Carlos
Plascencia)
Teran, Pedro (29, 37-38,116,123,126,128/254,
257-258)
b. Venezuela 1943; lives in Caracas, Venezu ela
Todos Estrellas (47, 185, 193 /286)
Jose Antonio Echeverria Sports Center, Veda do,
University of Havana, Cuba 1989
(Nilo Castillo, Maldito Menendez, Antonio Eligio
(Tonel). Eduardo Ponjuan, Luis Gomez, Abdel
Hernandez, Hubert Moreno. Ermy Tafio, Carlos
Rodriguez Cardenas, Eric Gomez, Victor Manuel,
Alejandro Aguilera, Tomas Esson, Nicolas Lara, Pedro
Alvarez, Alejandro Lopez, Robaldo Rodriguez, Ruben
Mendoza, Angel Alonso, Rafael Lopez, Glexis Novoa,
Ivan de La Nuez, Alejandro Frometa, Lazaro Saavedra.
Rene Francisco. Pedro Vizcaino, Jose Angel Toirac.
Juan Pablo Ballester, Gerardo Mosquera, Llopiz, Flavia
Garciandia, Silveira, David Palacios, Adriano Buergo,
and Azcano MCrsica: Zeus and Takson. Rock Bands
Torres, Susana (55, 159 I 272)
b. Peru
Trasobares, Cesar (33, 183, 187 I 282. 28,1)
b. H~lgu in, Cuba 1919: liamr. Florida 196 . li·:ec '1 !''!i3•n;
Tellez, Eugenio 134 , 167)
b. Venezuela
Tropicana, Carmelita 151.183.196 . 282.2881
b. Cuba; lives 111 New York Cr ty
Trujillo, Teresa (20)
b. I onteviden, Uruguay 1937; lives in ~. i o n t ev :cl ,;n
Tucuman Arde (1 4, 24. 89- 90, 1191 230', 2-15. 256)
Actrve Rosano. Argentina 1968
(included Noemi E ~ ra 1dcll. Graciela Carnevalr.l\·ta•i<J
Teresa Gramuglio, Martha Greiner, 1aria c~e
Arechavala, Estela Pomerantz. Nicolas Rosa. ~lel a
Bortolottr. Jose Maria Lavarello. Edmundo Giura.
Rodolf aEli zalde. Jaime Rippa, Ruben Naranjo, Norberta
Puzzolo, Eduardo Favario, Emilio Ghilioni, Juan Pablo
Renzi, Carlos Schork, Nora de Schork, David de Nully
Braun, Roberto Zara, Oscar Pidustwa, Domingo Sapia,
Raul Perez Canton and Sara Lopez Dupuy of Rosano,
Gracie Ia Bortchwick and Jorge Cohen of Santa Fe, and
Richard Carreira, Leon Ferrmi, Roberto Jacoby and
BeatrizBalbe of Buenos Aires, among others)
Tunga (15,43, 111-1121230,252)
b. Palmares, Pernambuco, Brazil;
lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Urena Ramos, Aristides (46, 209/294)
b. Panama 1955
Valente, Maria (136 I 264)
b. Mexico
Vargas, Eugenia (44, 46)
b. Chile 1949; lives in Miami, Florida; Mexico City,
Mexico and Chilan, Mexico
Vargas, Zalathiel (143 I 267)
b. Mexico
Vasconcelos, Tito (36, 42)
b. Mexico; lives in Mexico City, Mexico
Velez-Aguayo, Evelyn (51)
b. Puerto Rico
Vicuna, Cecilia (34, 55, 167, 178 I 276, 280)
b. Santiago, Chile 1948; London, England 1973- 1980:
New York City 1980; lives in Chile and New York City
Vi go, Edgardo Antonio (24, 26, 95- 96, 99 I 246)
b. Buenos Aires, Argentina 1927: d. Buenos Aires 1997
Villanes, Eduardo 151,52,157 1272)
b. Lima, Peru 1967; lives in Massachusetts
Vitteri, Alicia (31, 42, 206 I 292)
b. Panama 1949
Vivas Arias, Angel (116-117, 133 /254- 255)
b. 1\laracay, Venezuela 1949: d. Paris, France 1986
Wenemoser, Alfred 137-38, 40,11 6.1 23. 126.1 29
130I 254, 257-2591
b. r\ustria 195l liv,;s in CJrclcas, Vene'tl! !J
Yeguas del Apocalipsis (17- 1'):
Active Siinti<Jgo, Cn;il! 1 989-p iu~ t
!Pedro I ~ me iJe iiJ . Sa·1 tia gn, Cilrie;
li ve~ in Santragu and FranciSLOCa·as iJ . San! .rw•.
Chi!c, ;;, ... , 111 Las Cruc,:s. Ch ;,;
Yeni y Nan t35-38, 11 6.123. 126,1 : 9/254 257-259)
(Jennifer HatJ:<>hilw, b. 1 9~8 Jn:l !.larid Luisa
Gon7alel . b. Vr•m•1uei,i 1%5
Zerpa, Ca rlos 135, 37. 40. 6 ~ 116, 12:!. :2E- 12R.
133 I 232, 254. 257- 2581
b. lfenezue!a, 1950: lives in Caraca\ Venezu ela
Zevallos, Sergio 142, 44, 154-155. 160 /27 1)
IJ. Lima, Peru, 1962: Germany 1989; Berlin, Gmman,'
1995: lives in Berlin
Zurita, Raul (30. 35, 40. 41. 51,163,165, 168 ' 275- 277)
b. Santiago, Chile 1951; lives in Santiago
311
 l

Credits
Images of works of art reproduced in this volume have been provided in most cases by the owners or custodians of the works.
Individual works of art appearing herein is protected by copyright in the United States or elsewhere, and may thus not be reproduced in any form
without the perm ission of the copyright owners.
The copyrigh t notices and credi ts included herein appear at the request of the artists, their heirs or representa tives, and/or owners of the works.
Every effort was made to locate copyright holders by the time of publication The publishers apologize in advance for any unintended errors or l
om1ss1ons. and would appreciate notification of additional credits for acknowledgment in future editions.
Dimensions are height x width x depth in inches.
Most images in the timeline are details.

FRONT COVER PAGE 13 PAGES 24-2S

Papo Colo
Superman 57, West Side Highway,
New York City, US, 1977
Gelatin silver print. 40 x29.13
Collection El Museo del Barrio, NY
Gift of the artist with additional support from
"PROARTISTA Sustaining the Work of Living
Contemporary Artists," a fund from the Jacques and
Natasha Gelman Trust, 2003.18.5
Image courtesy the artist. C9 Papa Colo
INSIDE FRONT COVER
Maria Teresa Hincapie
Vitrina (Shop Window)
70 poetico cotidiano I70 Daily Poetics)
Encuentro Latinoamericano de Arte Popular
Bogota, Colombia, 1989, video still
Image courtesy Galeria Casas Riegner
INSIDE BACK COVER
Jorge Eielson
Nage (Nataci6n I Swimming). Paris, France, 1969
Image courtesy Centro Studi Jorg Eielson for the
Diffusion of Hispano-American Culture and
Martha Canfield
BACK COVER
Nao Bustamante
America the Beautiful
The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics
Encuentro Peru 2002. Globalization. M(qration and the
Public Spt1erc, Lima, Peru, July 10. 2002
Photo by Lorie Novak
C-print, 2 ~x 18
Collection El ~·luseo del Barrio
Gift of the artist with additional -;upport fmm
"PROARTIST1 Sustaining the Work of Li ving
rn•ltemporary i\rtist\ " a fund from tho Joccp ·r-~ <111'1
Natasha Gelman Trust. 2008.5.2
Image courtesy El tvluseo del Barrio, NY
Image 'c1 Lorie Novak. WI' 'l.loriEnoval:.com
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
dcrny Pc;fl"ll' Piann C,:stt .. ction ~·oncr ·t 1\ith PapPI
B.~ l Jd~·trcsc t:>t
.~ ·i:: t': "!ut!:c ;n.::Jk:w:. :•!c.•: ·:,·\
lnr ~e courtesy the artist
1'.4GE 9
Raphael Montanez Ortiz
Yes. No. MaihP,
El Museo del Barrio, New York City, US,
January 31, 2008
Images courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
Photos by Jose Luis Ramirez
Rod olio Aguerreberry, Julio Flores,
Guillermo Kexel
Siluetazo(Silhoutle Action)
Ill Marcha de Ia Resistencia. Buenos Aires, Argentina
September 21,1983
Photo by Eduardo Gil
Gelatin silver print. 9.38 x12
Collection Eduardo Gil
Image courtesy Eduardo Gil
TIMELINE CREDITS
PAGES 16- 17
1 Image courtesy Gabriela Rangel
2 Image courtesyJulieta Kemble. Photo by Jorge Roiger
3 Courtesy Archives KWY, Lourdes Castro.
Photo by Rene Bertholo. Image courtesy Archives
KWY. Lourdes Castro
4 Image courtesy Gabriela Rangel
Pages 18 -19
1 Image courtesy Marta Minujin
2 Image courtesy Van ina Greco. Photo by Montserrat
Santamaria (also reproduced on Contents page)
3 Image courtesy Assoc i a~ao Cultural "0 Mundo de
Lygia Clark" (also reproduced on Contents page)
4 Image courtesy Ivan Cardoso and Proj to Helio Oiticica
5 Collection of Dan1el Gonzalez. Image courtesy of
Daniel Gonzaler Photo by Daniel Gonzalez
PAGES ~0-~ 1
1 Image courtesy Julio Le Pate
2 Images courtesy Ter sa Trujillo
3 Courtesy fluherto Jacob·;.
lmaqe courtes·; El ~.1 u seo del Barh ~ f(
4 Image CI'Urtesy Rarhae! ~.\on oilez Orti:
5 Image courtesy Morta ~1inujin
6 ln.agl·~ cnurtesy Susana Lijln ar1
7 Courtesy David Lame las. maccarone galler·tlr;c.
ami Galeri" Jan ~ lot, Brussi.ls. lm:Jge courte<y
David Lamelas, maccarone gallery nt c. end Galerie
Jan Mot. Brussels
8 Image courtesy Eduardo Costa
p.~r; ES_2-23
1 Image courtesy RobertoJacoby
2 Col ection of Rolando Peiia.
Image courte sy Rnlandr Priia
C:y, US, 19G7 3 Image courte. y Raphael Monta11e1Ortiz
.J Image courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape. 2008
& Projeto Lygiil Pape
5 lnwge courtesy Associa~iio Cultural
"0 Mundo de Lygia Clark"
6 1lideo courtesy Nicolas Garcia Ur i b~11 u .
Image courtesy Nicolas Garcia Uriburu
7 Courtesy of Estate of Oscar Bony and Queens
Museum of Art. Image courtesy the Estate of
Oscar Bony and MALBA - Fundaci6n Costantini
(Museo de Arte La tinoamericano de Buenos Aires)
8-9 Collection of Graciela Carneville. Images courtes
G1 aciela Camevale. Photos by Carlos Militello
1 Image courtesy Fundaci6n Centro de Artes
Vi suales de La Plata - Pers. Juridica no" 6208
2 Col lection of Rafael Ferrer.
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
3 Image courtesy Jacobo Borges
4 Image courtesy Associacao Cultural
"0 Mundo de Lygia Clark"
5 Collection of Graciela Carnevale.
Image courtesy Gracie Ia Carnevale
6 Courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation.
Image courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation
7 Collection of Rafael Ferrer.
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
8 Courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation. Image
courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation
9 The Fire of Li fe The Robert Legorreta- Cyclona
Col lection, The UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center Library and Archive. Image courtesy The I
Fire of Life The Robert Legorreta-Cyclona
Collection. The UCLA Chicano Studies Research
Center Library and Archive
10 Image courtesy Centro Studi Jorge Eielson
for the Diffusion of Hispano-American Culture
and Martha Canfield
PAGES 26- 27
1 Image courtesy Artur Barrio. Photo by Cesar
Carneiro
2 Image courtesy Cildo Meireles ami Galerie Lelong,
New York. (C) Cildo Meireles, Courtesy Galerie
Lelong, New York
3 Collection of Antonio Manuel.
Photo Carlos. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio.
NY. Documentation pho o by Jason 1iindella
.J-5 Collection of Rafael Ferrer.
lrnJgc coc;te>YEi ~,1 u ~eo de: Barria. :JY
6 lrn"gG w rrte>y the Fr;lipe Ehrenberg aiid
Fernando Llilnus ; seFeli7consume'!IDEO
7 lrna~e court esy Fundoci6n Centro •le Artes
lli ~ ua l es de La Plat"- Pers. Jurirlin no F~DS
8 liiiage courte>y TEUR/eTicil
9 The Fire of Lif" The Robert Legorreta-Cyclona
Collection. The UCLA Chicano Studies Resrwch
Center Library and Archi;e Imager ourtes·;
El Museo de! Barri o. NY Orr' lme•JtJt.o:l
photo by Jcson Mandella
~ 0 '/ideo courtl')·,· Leopolda f\1o1tr. ..i OJL CGUI !t )
El Museo del Barrio. NY. Video still taken by
Claudia Joskowicz
11 Collection of El Museo del Barrio. N'1, Gift of the
artist with additional support from "PROARTISTA
Sustaining the Work of Living Contemporary
Artists. " a fund from the Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trr"t. 20Q318.1a-b.lmage cnurtesy
El Museo del Barrio. N
PAGES 28-79
1 Estate of Victor Grippo, Courtesy Alexander
and Bonin, New York. Image courtesy
El Museo del Barrio, NY Dncumentdtion
photo lr Jason Mandella

312
 2 Collection El Museo del Barrio, Gift of the artist
wi th additional support from "PROARTISTA
Sustaining the Work of Living Contemporary
Artists," a fund from the Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust, 2008.2.2. Image courtesy El Museo
del Barrio, NY Photo by Harry Gamboa, Jr.
© 1972 Harry Gamboa, Jr.
3 Collection El Museo del Barrio, Gift of the artist
with additional support from "PROARTISTA
Sustaining the Work of Living Contemporary
Artists," a fund from the Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust, 2008.2.1. Image courtesy El Museo
del Barrio, NY Photo by Harry Gamboa.Jr. © 1972
Harry Gamboa, Jr.
4 Image courtesy Miguel-Angel Cardenas
5 Image courtesy Anna Bella Geiger
6 Courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation. Image
courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
7 Collection of Antonio Manuel.
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
8 Image courtesy Jose Antonio Hernandel Amezkua
and VIctor Munoz
9 Image courtesy Marta Minujfn
10 Chicano Cinema, Image courtesy Harry Gamboa, Jr.
©1 976 Harry Gamboa. Jr.
PAGES 30-31
1 Video and image courtesy the Estate of Ana
Mendieta Collection and Galerie Lelong, New
York. © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection,
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, Ne'N York
2 Image courtesy Doris Spencer de Barboza
Collection. Photo by Doris Spencer de Barboza
3 Courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation. Image
courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation
4 Collection El Museo del Barrio, Gift of the artist
with additional support from "PROARTISTA
Sustaining the Work of Living Contemporary
Artists," a fund from the Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust, 2008.2.5. Image courtesy El Museo
del Barrio, NY. Photo by Harry Gamboa, Jr. © 197 4
Harry Gamboa, Jr.
5 Courtesy Centro Studi Jorge Eielson for the
Diffusion of Hispano-American Culture and Martha
Canfield. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
6 Video courtesy Funclacion Claudio Perna. Image
courtesy El Museo del Barrio. NY Video still
captured by Claudia Joslowicz
7 Collection EIMuseo del Barrio, Gift of the arti>t
with additional support from "PROARTISTA
Sustaining the Work of Living ConWmpora ry
Artists," a fund frorn the Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust, 2008.2.6. lrnage courtqsy El Museo
del Barrio. NY Photo by Harry Gamboa. Jr.[! 1975
Harry Gamboa, Jr.
8 Image courtes Fundacion Taller Publiro
Silvana Lora
9 lmagr. courte y Clemente Pad fn
P.;GES 32-J1
1 Video and image courtesy th e Estate of Ana
Mendieta Collection and Galer1e Lelong,
New York. «1 The Estate of Ana Mendieta
Collection, Courtesy Gal erie Lelong, New Yor~
2 Image courtesy Papa Colo
3 Image courtesy Fundacion Claudio Perna
4 lmaqe courtesy Artist's Archive
www.cesartrasobares.com
5 Image courtesy Gallery Paule Anglim
P' GES 34- 35
1 Video Collection of Lotty Rosenfeld. Image
courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
2 Collection of Marta MinuJin.lmage courtesy
Marta Minujfn
3 Image courtesy Diamela Eltit and the Hemispheric
Institute for Performance and Politics at New York
Univers ity. Photo by Lotty Rosenfeld
4 Collection of Grise! Pujala. Image courtesy Leandro
Soto. Photo by Francisco Rodriguez
5 Courtesy Cildo Meireles and Gal erie Lelong,
New York. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio,
NY Documentation photo by Jason Mandella.©
Cildo Meireles, Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
6 Video Collection of Lotty Rosenfeld. Image
courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
7 Video Collection of Rolando Peiia. Image courte>y
Rolando Peiia
8 Image courtesy Jaime Davidovich
9 Video courtesy of Gallery Paule Anglim. image
courtesy Gallery Paule Anglim
10 Image of the cover of Purgatorio, published by
Editorial Universitaria, Santiago, Chile, 1979.
Image courtesy Raul Zurita
PAGES 36-37
1 Image courtesy Marcos and Berenice Ettedgui.
Photo by Julio Vengoechea
2 Image courtesy Maris Bustamante. Photo by
Ruben Valencia
3 Image courtesy Gallery Paule Anglim
4 Image courtesy Carlos Leppe
5 Image courtesy Antonieta Sosa
6 Images courtesy Marta Minujin
7 Collection of El Museo del Barrio, NY, Gifts of the
artist with additional support from "PROARTISTA
Sustaining the Work of Living Contemporary
Artists," a fund from the Jacques and Natasha
Gelman Trust. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio,
NY Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
8 Image courtesy Pedro Teran. Photo by Taller Pedro
Teran
P GES 38-39
1 Video Collection of Lotty Rosenfeld. Image
courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
2 Collection of Franklin Furnace Archive. Image
courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY Documentation
photo by Jason Mandella
3 Collection of Marta Minujin Image courtesy
Marta Minujin
4 Courtesy Alfred Wen emoser. Image courtesy
El Museo del Barrio, NY Documentation photo
by Jason Mandel in
5 '.'ideo courtesy of Rossnra ,',~o is , \Viley Ludona.
Hugo Salazar dli Alcazar, 8nd ArmandoWilliam:.
8dited in collaboration with Teleducaci!in Pont1fici1
Uni•. e1sidad Cat61ica del Peru CETUC. lma;w
courtesy Sharon Lerner Rii0-Pdtr6n
6 Permanent Collection of the Miami-Dade Public
L1brary System Image courtesy El Museo del
Barrio. NY. Documentation photo by Jason
Mandella
7 Image courtes·r Carlos Altamirano
8 Courtesy Alfredo Jaar and Galeric Lufong,
Ncv1 Yorl- I. .J~JP. COllftC'I A!f• r do J1ar 0r1d
Galerie Lelonq, Nx·1 York
9 Image cour t 'Y Galic11 PaJIL .\ng!>1:
10 Image courte~y l.cop J:Jo f'.'la!er
PAGES 40-41
1 Image courtes·1 Maris Bustamante. Photo by
Alfredo Nunez
2 Image courtesy the archives of El Museo del Barno.
NY. Photo by Daisy Mora
3 Image courtesy Leopolda Maier
4 Image courtesy Geo Ripley
5 Image courtesy Juan Gonzalez Loyola. Photo
by Armando Castillo
6 Image courtesy Rail! Zurita
7 Collection of Eduardo Gil. Image courtesy of
Eduardo Gil Photo by Eduardo Gil
8 Collection of Marta Minujfn. Image courtesy
Marta Minujfn
9 Video Collection of Lotty Rosenfeld. Image
courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
10 Image courtesy Papa Colo
PAGES -\2-43
1 Collection of Franklin Furnace Archive.
Image courtesy Papa Colo
2 Collection of Sergio Zevallos. Image courtesy
Sergio Zevallos
3 Image courtesy KMAN. Photo by
Ana Pulido Bartlett
4 Collection of Lotty Rosenfeld.
Image courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
5 Courtesy Art Kendallman. Image courtesy
(Art Kendallman)
6 Image courtesy Tunga and Luhring Augustine,
New York
7-9 Videos courtesy Antonieta So sa. Images courtesy
Antonieta Sosa
10 Video courtesy Nela Ochoa. Image courtesy
El Museo del Barrio, N
PAGES 44-45
1 Image courtesy David Avalos
2 Video courtesy BAW(TAF and Michael Schnorr.
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
Video still captured by Me lisa Lujan
3 Image courtesy Te6filo Freytes
4 Courtesy Eugenia Vargas and Carla Stellweg,
New York. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio,
NY. Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
5 Image courtesy Cuban Performance Art of the
1980s (Chronology). Collection Glexis Novoa
6 Video courtesy Maris Bustamante, Polvo de
Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante/Manica Mayer).
Image courtesy Maris Bustamante, Paiva de
Gallina Negra (Maris Bustamante/Manica Mayer)
7-8 Courtesy Cuban Performance Art of the 1980s
(Chronology). Collection Gle is Novoa. image
courtesy Cuban Performance Art of the 1980s
(Chronology), Collection Gle is Novoa
9 Image courtesy of Galeria Casas Riegner
PAGES 1u-·: ,
1 Installation vie·.vs of Rdplwrl Montaiiu Lli liz
h:rs of 1/Y iVar·irr 1960- )ears of the ns:ch•
19fi,7at El Muoco del Barrio, NY.
lmagLs courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
'• C0llec tion of El ~:iu seo del BJrrio. ijY Gift of the
arti ~ t l 'li h additional support from "PRO RTIST,i.
Sustaining the War~ of Living Contemporar,' :1 rt1 ~ ts. "
a fund from theJacquesand Natasha Gelman Trust.
Image courtGS\' El Museodel Barrio. NY.
Photo by Richard A. Lou. c Richard A. Lou
3 lmaqe c~u rtesy Juan-Sf Gonzalez and Ritua!, rt-Dt!.
Phw lly an ti ago Yanes
r, I•Page rrurtcsy r• 1 a'l P_r ormilnre A rt~~ tl• e
1980s(Chronology). Collection Glexis Novoa
5-6 Imago tJltrlesf Cuban Performance Art of tho
1980s (Chronology). Collection Glexis Nolioa
7 Collection of El Museo del Barrio. NY. Gift of the
artist with additional support from "PROARTIST ·
Sustaining the Work of Living Contemporary i\11ists."
a fund from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust.
lrmge courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
8 Image courtesy of Galeria Casas Riegner
9 Courtesy of Alonso Mateo. Image courtesy
of Alonso Mateo
10 Courtesy Jose A. Figueroa and Cristina Vives
lmaqer.ourtesy Jose A. Fi~11eroa and Cristina
Vives. Photo IJy Jose A. rigueroa
313
 l
PAGES 48-49 PAGE 65lalso reproduced on Contents page!
1 Video courtesy BAW(fAF and Michael Schnorr. 4 Video courtesy Elena Tejeda-Herrera.
Rafael Ferrer
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY. Video still Video by Adrian Arias. Image courtesy
captured by Claudia Joskowicz Elena Tejeda-Herrera Three Leaf Piece, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City,
US, December 4, 1968
2 Video courtesy Alcuadrado Gallery 5 Collection of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10
Image courtesy Alcuadrado Gallery Image courtesy The Fabric Workshop and
Museum. Photo by Will Brown.© Maria Fernanda Collection of the artist
3 Image courtesy Liliana Felipe and Jesusa
Rodriguez, Photo by Christa Courie Cardoso and Casas Reigner Gallery Image courtesy El Muse a del Barrio, NY
4 Courtesy Angel Delgado and Nina M~nocal 6 Courtesy the Francis Alys and David Zwirner,
PAGE G7
Gallery, Mexico OJ Image courtesy Angel Delgado New York. C0 Francis Alys,
and Nina Menocal Gallery, Mexico OJ Courtesy David Zwirner, New York Jaime Davidovich
5 Costume by Pep6n Osorio. Collection of El Museo As Or. Videovich in The First New York City Art Parade,
del Barrio, NY, Gift of Coco Fusco, T96.25a-b. PAGES54-55 New York City, US, 1983
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY. Photo by 1 Image courtesy Elena Tejeda-Herrera Image courtesy Jaime Davidovich. Photo by Marta Sentis
Eddie J Bartolomei 2 Video courtesy Santiago Sierra and Lisson Gallery,
6 Installation view of Every Week There is London. Image courtesy Santiago Sierra and PAGE 69
Something Different (week two) at Andrea Rosen Lisson Gallery, London As co
Gallery, New York.© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres 3 Collection of Freddie Mercado Velazquez. Photo by Decoy Gang War Victim, Los Angeles, CA. US, 1975,
Foundation. Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, Carlos "Bora." Image courtesy El Museo del reprinted 2006
New York. Photo by Peter Muscato Barrio, NY. Documentation photo by Jason Photo by Harry Gamboa. Jr.
7 Installation view of Arte ;t Vidd. Actions by Artists Mandella C-print from original unretouched 35 mm slide. 16 x 20
of the Americas, 1960-2000 at El Museo del 4 Image courtesy Regina Jose Galindo and Collection El Mus eo del Barrio
Barrio, NY. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, prometeogallery de Ida Pisani Gift of the artist with additional support from
NY. Documentation photo by Jason Mandella 5 Video courtesy BAW(fAF and Michael Schnorr. "PROARTISTA Sustaining the Work of Living
8 Video courtesy Nao Bustamante. Image courtesy Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY. Video still Contemporary Artists," a fund from the Jacques and
Claudia Joskowicz captured by Claudia Joskowicz Natasha Gelman Trust. 2008.2.6
Image courtesy El Mus eo del Barrio, r~Y
rl,GES 5J-51 PAGES 5G-57 © 1975 Harry Gamboil, Jr.
1 Image courtesy Almendra Vi lela 1 Image courtesy Gustavo Buntinx
2 Image courtesy Marta Chilindron 2 Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY As co
3 Image courtesy Richard A. Lou 3 Video courtesy Teresa Margolies and Galerie Peter Spraypaint LACMA (aka Prowct Pie in De/Face)
4 Courtesy Daniel Joseph Martinezand The ProJect, Kilchmann, Zurrch. Image courtesy El Museo del Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Los Angeles,
New York. Collection of Michael Brenson. Barrio, N Video still captured by Melisa Lujan CA. US, 1972, reprinted 2006
Image courtesy Daniel Joseph Martinez 4 Image courtesy Grupo Enema Photo by Harry Gamboa. Jr.
and The Project. NY C-print frorn originalunretouched 35 mm slide. 16 x 20
5 Video Collection of the artists Elizabeth Sisco, Collection Ellvluseo del Barrio
Louis Hock, David Avalos. Image courtesy Gift of the artist with additional support from
El Museo del Barrio, NY.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS "PROARTISTA: Sustainrng the Work of Living
Video still captured by Me lisa Lujan Contemporory Artists," a fund fromthe JJ<:que' and
PAGE 59
6 Video courtesy BAW!fAF and Michael Schnorr. Natasha Gelman Trust. 2008.2.1
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY. Papo Colo Image courtesy EIIVluseo del Barrio. NY
Video still captured by Claudia Joskowic1 Superman 51, West Side Highway, New York Ci ty, © 1972 Harry Gamboa, Jr
7 Image courtesy Raul Zurita us' 1977 As co
8 Collection of El Mus eo del Barrio, NY, Acquired Image courtesy the artist Instant Mural
through "PROARTISTA Sustaining the Work of
East Los Angeles, CA. US, 1974. reprinted 2006
Living Contemporary Arti sts," a fund from the PAGE 60
Photo by Harry Gamboa. Jr.
Jacque~ and Natasha Gelman Trust Jnd a donation
Raphael Montanez Ortiz C-print from or ig i n~ I unretouched 3S mm :.::.le, 1Cx2n
from the artist. 2004.7. l lrrilil<!uluaica! Fine .c:!l. Ti·,, .-l'•o:r"-111'. i J.,··; Y,f! C0iiection El lvLull d"! Barrio
Image courtesy E! fvluseo del Barrio. Nl.
CilyUS. l 961 Gift of tlif' ilrtr ~ t \'lith atklrtinr>JI Slll~ n oll fro111
9 V !t::' C';'Hte· '/ Clrirc:ita Tr 'I(CYd i··;·il[j' "PROARTI STA Sustainiqq the'No: f ~~ Livrnq
kli xud media, 58 x 108 x 21
CL 1 lf~.t ---' ,' L:tlll(l ,. I til r.lr:t\danls. PhtJ! .J b)· Don:l ~~~!I.
Collection El Musco del Barr io Contemporary ,\rusts." a'funrJ from !he ,liJ .rirw ~ .mrl
! l •AI Jrll~ c 0CY1 .·\nn t.lcA laT ., f jyr,
Grit cf till; artist .'!!ill addi: i o ~Ja l :··rpr.o;i frcn. atasi;a Gel:ltan Tru ~ t. 2!)QB2 5
10 C'-'HlL;,y R11Jr.rtL JclCOIJ;.
' PROARTI STA Sustaining the 1/l!or ~ of Li ving Image courte~, El ~ u ~er' del Barri0. N"(
linre courte<'l El !,iust''J del Bilrr;r_ f Y f • 137 <4 Harr-,· r]ambo,,, Jr.
Ccn!emporart Arti sts." a fun;! fro 1n tlw J a,: q tt ~ "' il ll>•
C:ncurr;erlldtiun phuto IJ; J <~s •mlvi a ncl e l ia
Natasl,a Gelman Trust, 2007.16
11 Co'!ec tron of Freddie Mercado Voliizquez
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY h\rE 73
PiJo·o O\' Fernando Paes Image rourt e ~y
Dorumentation photo byJason ~an del! a
El ~- 1u:;eo de! Barrio, NY. ·c· 1961 Raphael lv1ontar1ez Ortiz Border Art Workshop I
D'JC : ilr : ,'n! ~ hJn Jh otn b\· Jason 'AaPJe!lci Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW(fAW)
P;,GE li l Bordrr Sutures, 2000 mr!es from Browns\ iile.
.:::) .:· CJ leAas io Tiju na. lliLx;c,l
1 Jonw Viii<Jr.nrta Collectron. lm<JQe courte ~y Poster for Street Works I r\-.tgu::r 1990, video s'r'ls
Eliuardr V:llnnes. Photo by Manuel Boiuarte Designed bv John Perreault \'rdeo courtesy B..l.W' iil.F and ~li ch<~ ei Schnorr
/. ~oll cction of EI IViu:.eo de! Barrio, ~J'r, Grit of the 42 Street - 52 Street. lvladison to Sixth 1\vPIIUU, r11agr:s ~ m; rt r:s·,- El f/ u,.co l ei Barri 0, ~JY
artist with additional oupport from "PROART!STA New York City, US, March 15. 1969 '/ideo strll s ca pturod by Clil~dr a Jasko 'lie
Sustain in[] tile Work of Living Contemporary Image courtesy Eduardo Costa ami John Perreault
Artis ts," a fund Irom tile Jacques and Natasha P1\G E75
Gel rmn Trust. 7008.53 Image courtesy PAGE G4
El Musen del Barrro, NY. Photo by Lorie Navar. Guillermo G6mez-Peiia and Coco Fusco
Nicolas Garcia Uriburu
(CJ Lorie rovak, w.vw lorienovak.com Two UndiscovwedAmerindians Visit Madrid, Sparn, 1992
Green New York. Intercontinental ProJect Photo by Peter Barker
3 Image courtesy Juan GonzalezLoyola of Waters Environment
Photo by Juan Gonzalez Loyola Image courtesy Coco Fusco
The East River and Bonino Gallery, New York City, US, 1970
Image courtesy of the artist
l

PAGE 77 Graciela Carnevale PAGE 110

Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, David Avalos Encierro y escape (Confinement and Escape)
Cicio de Arte Experimental, Rosario, Argentina Cildo Meireles
Arte Reembo/so!Art Rebate, San Diego, CA. US, Documentation photograph of the installation/action
1993, video stills October 8, 1968
Photo by Carlos Militello 0 Sermao da Montdnha. Fiat Lux
Video Collection of the artists Elizabeth Sisco, (The Sermon on the Mount. Let There Be Light)
Louis Hock, David Avalos Gelatin silver print. 6 x 8.5
Collection of Graciela Carnevale Centro Cultural Candido Mendes. lpanema, Rio de
Images courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY Janeiro, Brazil, 1973/1979
Video stills captured by Melisa Lujan Image courtesy Graciela Carnevale
Photo by Ana Viloria Mussy
PAGE 94
126000 'Fiat Lux' matchboxes, 8 mirrors, black
PAGE 78 sandpaper, 8 beatitudes from the Sermon on the
Daniel Joseph Martinez Victor Grippo Mount (Matthew V, 3-1 0). 5 actors, 24 hours, overall
Museum Tags Second Movement (Overture) or Traditional Rural Oven for Making Bread, 1972 dimensions approx. 64 square meters
Overture con Claque-Overture with Hired Audience 4 gelatin silver prints, 20 x67 each Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York
Members Estate of Victor Grippo, Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, Image Courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
The Whitney Biennia/Whitney Museum of American New York. Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
Art. New York City, US, 1993 Documentation photo by Jason Mandella @ Cjldo Meireles. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York
Collection of Michael Brenson
Image courtesy the artist and The Project, NY PAGE 96 PAGE 111
Edgardo Antonio Vi go
PAGE 8.1 Seilalamiento no. 1, ManOJO de semiiforos Tunga
(Signal Point No.I, Bunch of Traffic Lights) Pictured left Pente IComb). 1984-1997
Marta Minujin Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 25, 1968 Copper and brass, 5x 157.5 x 78.69
La Destrucciun (Destruction). Impasse Ronsin, Paris, Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art.
Image courtesy Fundaci6n Centro de Artes
France, June 8, 1963 Center for Curatorial Studies. Bard College,
Visuales de La Plata - Pers Juridica no 0 6208
Image courtes the artist Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
PAGE 99
Pictured right Xip6fagas capildrcs (Capillary Siamese
PAGE 86 Twrns). January 31, 2008
Alberto Greco Liliana Maresca El Museo del Barrio. New York City, US
ViwDitos ancl Autorretrato(Self-Portrait) Vi1•o-Ditos Maresca se entrega todo destino Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio, NY
Piedralaves. Avila. Spain, 1963 (Maresca ntfers Herself to Destiny) Photo by Jose Luis Ramirez
Photo>by iv1ontserrat Santam&riJ Buenos !\ires. ArgPntina. 1993
Images courtes Van ina Greco Photo-performance shot by Alejandro Kuropdtwa and PAGE 115
printed in erotic magazine El Lihertino Marco Antonio Ettedgui
PAGE 87 lm<1ge courtesy i\lmendra Vi lela 1-liyiene Corporal Mens :,ana in Corpore Sanu
(Evento Informal)
Kenneth Kemble, with Enrique Barilari, Jorge PAr-E 103 ICarrara/ Hy iene. A Sound Mind. ASound Body,
lopez Anaya, Jorge Roiger, Antonio Segui, Silvia Informal E1 -ent)
Torras, and luis Alberto Wells Helio Oiticica Caraca. , Venezuela, March 8, 1980
Arte Destructivo (Des;ruction ..1rt) Para•IQoiE's. 1964- 1968 Pho to byJulio Vungoechea
Galeria Lirolay, Buenos Aires. Argentim. November Frame-from HO, a film by Ivan Cardoso. 1979 Image courtesy Marcos and Berenice Ettedgui
20-30, 1961 Image courtesy !>:an Cardoso and Projeto H lio O!ticica
Photos by Jorge Roiger P;.GE!16
P~Gt lOS
Images courtesy Julieta Kemble
Rolando Peiia and the Foundation fo r the Tota lity
Antonio Manu el The Paella-Bicycle- Totality-Crucifixion
P:-GE 0 0 0 corpo ea obra I The Body is the Wo'k I WJido Diaz Balart's home, East Hampton. NY. U.S
Tucuman Arde XIXNat. on.il Sabn of ft.lo'ii!rn Art. Museum of ~. loclern September 1967
lnauqura:ion. GenPra l c ,,n f~dua t i II of Aryt ntil,t.ar·. Art. RiP de Janr irn, Bruzil , ~ 1 .v 197n Filrned for Andy Vvarhol's · (Four Stars). 19G7
\'Jorkc:r .I (CG T,\1trade tilliJc ,ffices Getdtin \ il~f rrn t, RX10 '
Pi)(' tOli\ Bili·,· Narns
Rqqrin, A•u, ntin N• \ ~llliP ! 1053 Pi'Qtr Carl w ro!IPc ti on cf tile w:iq lr,·aar r.~u rt e'>\ FJi"t: do Pr.r\ 1
Gclafin i i .r~~r priqt. h , 8.5 lm ge courte~·i the ar tr:l
t l'lli•ctinn nf Grac;,,I:J r:a rne. o!r
l:na<Jb c" ::tuy G· iic>:,, C;Hi ·,,d!,:
Alberto Brandt, El Tec ho de Ia Bal lena
lygia Pa pe Originol mani festo. !il!'ilCnJjP a Ia cursilerr;J
Dir isor. Rir de Jant ir c•. mzii, 19GB(1 99u) (Honugc to Schmall' )
Oscar Bony lmai e cullrt~s , Pro1etn Lvyia ~'il re Edi c ion e ~ El Tccho de Ia Ballena, Caracas, Venezuela
La familiJ obrera 2008 ·> Projeto Lyaia Papr June 1961
I The vlorAiny Class FJ·•rfri. 1968 ·1999 3 paiJtS: 6 x 8.5 each
D:yl· nnd ·:~!1 ~te p"·lt(lgrrw1; Llfl p11o1 ogr(.1~ ! 1 ir: npAr
Cor : ~..ctio; , of lg,; cia and Valentina Oberto, CaraCd>
awl n etili museum label, rMU!Ited in v: oden fra me. Image tour tr~ 1El Mu;eo dei Barrio, NY
c.! 7 ~ . 72.88 x GC.2S, 2 lygia Clark
0 eu eo~.!( The I ii'ld :he You). Ric de Jar,8:ro, B rr~:,l , UrJLlllliPilt:ltion photo iJ\' Jason t-,!andeliu
COI II leSy of E st~te of o~r-1r Bonya'ld QueensMu~urn of Art
lntdge wurt esy the Lta te of U\Cdr Bony amJ 1968
i'.i>ILBA- Funclacirin CJstcJn tini (~J u seo de Arte Frorn the Roupa-l:orrJ-HOI.p 1
Latrnoamrricano de Buenos f1ires) IC/otl:ing-Bocfv-Ciothing serie;) Jacobo Borges (artistic dire ctor)
Image courtesy Associa ~ao Cul tural lnoc nte Palacios (producer)
l'.".uE ~-' "0 Mundo de L1qia Clark" Imagen de Caracas IImage of Carccas).
Ed uardo Favario "Dispositivo Ciuclad." Caraca .. Venezuela, 1968
Obra c/,1//surada IClaseJ Wor ·) PAGE 'lll' Images courtesy Jacobo Borges
Cicio de Arte ExperimentJI. Rosario Argentina Artu r Barrio
September 9, 1968 Trow.as Ensdnguentadas. SITUA9AD
Photo by Carlos Militello (Bioodr Bundl~s. SITUATION). 1969
Gelatin silver print. 6 x 8.5 Photos by Cesar Carneiro
Collection of tJ rii CCIJ C1r:11"..1lc lrmuc- cuwtusy tli'J e~rt; .•t
Image courtes\' Graciela Camc1ale

315
 PAGE 122
Antoni eta Sosa
Plataforma //(Platform II).
Ateneo de Caracas, Caracas, Venezuela, 1969
Image courtesy the artist
Antonieta Sosa
Conversaci6n con bano de agua tibia
(Conversation with a Warm Bath)
Galeria de Arte Nacional. Caracas. Venezuela. 1980
Image courtesy the artist
PAGE 124
Claudio Perna
Antonio Mendoza's salsa band Chicles IChewing
Gum). sound sculpture
Once Tipos (Eleven Guys). Sal a de Ia Fundaci6n
Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela, 1977
Image courtesy Fundaci6n Claudio Perna
Claudio Perna
L/uvia, escultura social (Rain, Social Sculpture)
Once Tipos (Eleven Guys). Sala de Ia Fundaci6n
Mendoza. Caracas. Venezuela. 1979
Image courtesy Fundaci6n Claudio Perna
PAGE 125
Diego Barboza
La Caja de Cachicamo (Armadillo's Box). parking lot,
Caricuao. Caracas, Venezuela, October 31. 1975
Image courtesy Doris Spencer de Barboza.
Photo by Doris Spencer de Barboza
PAGE 127
Carlos Zerpa
(with Enrique Lara and Francisco Palma)
Ceremonia con armas blancas
(Ceremony with Sharp-Edged Weapons)
Acciones frente a Ia plaza. Plaza. Sal a de Ia
Gobernacion, Caracas, Venezuela, April19, 1981
Foro de Arte Contemporaneo. Mexico City, Mexico
Acciones en Margarita. Museo de Arte Contemporaneo
Francisco Narvaez- Porlamar, Venezuela
Gelatin silver print. 20.5 x 24.33
Collection El Museo del Barrio. NY. Gift of the artist
with additional support from "PROARTISTA Sustaining
the Work of Living Contemporory Artists." a fund from
the Jacques ilnd Natasha Gelman Trust
Image courtesy El Mu,eo del Bamo. NY
Documentation J ~ 110t o byJasnn ~;i and e lla
P.YJf 1"8
Pedro Teran
, t,,!,,s twaC1/071iJjd IC.ouds fr r Colom!Jiil). 1980- 1981
PrimPr Coloquiude Latirw,mmricano de A1 te No-0/ljetua/
~v1u s eo de Arte lv1oderno de Medell in. Colombia.
1ay 1981
t\ccivnr> frunte ala pl:lza. lvluseo de Bellas ~ rt e s .
Cara1 · s. Venezu81a. October i 7-18. 1981
i\r.cio:JP.S en . iaryarita. fv\u<;eo de Arte Contemporcineo
Fian,:i..co l~ar\'a v, . f urlamar. \'elle,ucia
Phnto b·; Taller Pcdrn Teran
ilnaqe courtesy th e artist
PMiEIJj
Maris Bustamante
Para quitarle a Freud Ia marho
ITo Get Rid of the Macho in Freud). 1982
Milsk for the performance Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot)
by No Grupo with Carlos Zerpa
Museo de Arte Moderno. Mexico City. Me ico.
January 21. 1982
Photo by Ruben Valencia
lmcgr~ courtesy Maris Bu;tiilll<1111C
'i6
PAGE139
Felipe Ehrenberg
A Date with Fate at the Tate (or, Tate Bait)
The Tate Museum. London. England, October 21. 1970
Scanned reproduction
Image courtesy the artist and Fernando Llanos I se
Feliz consume VIDEO
PAGE 141IALSO REPRODUCED ON CONTENTS PAGEl
Proceso Pentagono
(Jose Antonio HernandezAmezcua with Carlos Finck,
Victor Munoz. and Orlando Mendicutti)
Oesaparecido (Disappeared)
A nivel informativo IOn an Informational Level)
Palacio de Bellas Artes. Mexico City. Mexico
July-September. 1973
Image courtesy Jose Antonio Hernandez Amezkua
and Victor Muiioz
PAGE 143
Polvo de Gallina Negra
Madre par un dfa (Mother for a Day)
On the morning show Nuestro Mundo IOur World)
With host Guillermo Ochoa
Televisa studios. Mexico City, Mexico. Summer 1987
Video still
Image courtesy Maris Bustamante. Paiva de Gallina
Negra (Maris Bustamante/Manica Mayer)
PAGE 144
No Grupo with Carlos Zerpa
Caliente-Caliente (Hot-Hot)
Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas San Carlos.
Universidad Nacional de Mexico. DJ
Mexico City, Mexico, January 19. 1982
Museo de Arte Moderno. Mexico City, Mexico
January 21, 1982
Photo by Alfredo Nunez.
Image courtesy Maris Bustamante
PAGE 147
Francis Alys
Turista ITourist). Z6colo. Mexico City, Mexico, 1997
C-print. 5.75 x 4, EP. ALYFR 0073
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Image© Francis Alys, Courtesy David Zwirner. New York
PAGE 148
Santiago Sierra
465 Paid People
Museo Rufino Tamdyo, Sala 7. Mexico City, Mexico
October 1999. video stills
Images courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London
PAGE153
Colectivo Sociedad Civil
Lava Ia handera IWc1sh the Flag I
Plaza Mayor, Lima. Pertl
Friday;;, vld'1 2 ~-N ove m b e r 25. 2000
Image courte'y Gustavo Buntinx
PAGf: 154
Rossana Ago is, Wiley ludefia, Hugo Salazar del
Alcazar, Armando Williams
Lima en un ar!Jo/ ILima in a TrPuI
Intersections of avenues Nicolas de Pierola and Rufino
Torrico. Lirna. Peru. 1981. video still
Video edited in collaboration with Teleducaci6n
Ponti fica Universidad Cat61ica del Per(; CETUC
Courtesy of Rossana Ago is. Wiley Ludena. Hugo
Sala1ar del Alcazar. and Armando Williams
lm;JgrJs court esy Sharon Lellll;l Ri;o-Patron
PAGE 155
Sergio Zevallos and Grupo Chaclacayo
Detritus, Chaclacayo, Peru, 1986 I
Photos by Sergio Zevallos
Collection of Sergio Zevallos I
Images courtesy Sergio Zevallos
PAGE 156IA1so reproduced on Contents page)
I
Jorge Eielson
Paracas-Pyramid, Art Academy, Dusseldorf. Germany, 1974
Gelatin silver prints. 20 x 24 each
Courtesy Centro Studi Jorge Eielson for the Diffusion
of Hispano-American Culture and Martha Canfield
Image courtesy El Museo del Barrio. NY
Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
PAGE 157
Eduardo Vi IIanes
Proyecto Gloria Evaporada
I"Evaporated Glory" Project). 1994- 1995
Intervention, wall of Via Expressa. Lima. Peru. 1995
Gelatin silver print; 4.88 x 7
Left cut cardboard detail. 2008. 18.25 x 8.25 each
Courtesy the artist
Images cou rte sy El Museo del Barrio, NY
Documentation photo by Jason Mandella 1
PAGE 158
Elena Tejada-Hererra
Senorita de buena presencia buscc1ndo ernpleo
IGood-Looking Woman SePking Employment)
First lbero American Siena/ of Art
Museum of Art of Lima. Peru
October 30. 1997. video stills
Video by Adrian Arias
Images courtesy the artist
PAGE162
Carlos leppe
1919-1979 La Estrella I /he Star). Galeria CAL
Santia(JO, Chile. 1979
Image courtesy the artist
PAGE 16i
Lotty Rosenfeld
Accioncs de arte(Arl Actions). 1~ "/ 9 2000
Left: Un.1 rnili.t de ,·,.Jces s"h ' i:l p.:J.fo:u /10
(A Mill' of Crussc<· w the f'dl l!lilt'rlli
Santiago, Chile 1979- 1980
Right White! louse. W;J shingloll DC. US. 1981
Collection of Lott 1Rosenfeld
Images r.ourtes1Lotty Ro1enfeid
PAGE165
,I
Eugenio Dittborn
To Return I Y'VR. 50' ). .' irmail Painting No. 1OZ. 1993
Paint. stitching. charwal and photo<;ilk,creen on 3
sections of non-woven fabric. 82.68 x 165.35
Courtesy Alexandrr and Bonin. Ne.v York
Eugrnio Ditthorn Santiago, Chile. September 1993
Out of Place. Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Canada, October January 1993 - 1994
The Garden of Forking Paths. Kunsforeningen.
Copenhagen. Denmark. April-June 1998
La Cuioinr et Ia Gucrrc. BLffcr Ga!!ery, Univer Jity of
Houston. TX. US. April - May 2001
Encuentro entre Dos Mares. Bienal Sao Paulo-
Valencia. Spain, March- June 2007
Arte noes Vida. Actions byArtists of the Americans,
1960-2000. El Mus eo del Barrio New York City, US.
January 31 - May 18 7008
lmc1ge courtesy the artist
l

PAGE 169 PAGE 185 PAGE 202

CADA
(Colectivo Acciones de Arte I Art Actions Collective)
iAY, Sudamericai(Ohl South America.
Santiago, Chile. July 12. 1981
Col lection of Lotty Rosenfeld
Image courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
PAGE 170 (alsoreproduced on Contents pagel
CADA
(Colectivo Acciones de Arte I Art Actions Collective)
NO+. Santiago, Chile. Late 1983
Collection of Lotty Rosenfeld
Image courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld
PAGE 173
Juan Downey
Plato Now. 1972
Drawing, 31 x 41
Collection of John G. Hanharclt
Image courtesy the Juan Downey Foundation
PAGE 176-177
Alfredo Jaar
Installation Opus 1981 I AnJante Desesperato
Santiago, Chile. 1981
Video (DVD) looped. 2framed photographic prints. eel. 1t6
Photos 8 x 12 and 14 · 20 (Meiselas image)
Courtesy Galeria Lia Rurnma, Milan
Images courtesy Galeria Lia Rurnrna. Milan
Page 176 Photo by Susan Meise Ia>. r9 Susan Meiselas
Page 177 Video stills. (9 Alfredo Jaar
PAGE 180 (also re~ru.i~<t' I on CQ r:e ·:: ~ pagr)
Ana Mendieta
Untitled (Blood Sign t2. 'BoJr Tracl.s}. io 1:1a. US. 1974
Super-B. silent, color film transferred to DVD. 120
looped. video still
Video courtesy the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection
and Gal erie Lelong, New 'orl:
Images<C The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong. New York
PAC E181
Tani a Bruguera
The Burden of Guilt.
H .lvt~na BiennBie, Havana. CtthJ. 1997- 1999
C-print. 40 x 27
Col lt!Ciion El t.!useo d, l Barrio
Gift of the artist with additJJt.ai :.upport from
"PRUI\RTISTI\ S u stami n~ tile ':\fork of Livinu
Conternporar Artists." J fund from the Jacques and
Natasha Gelman Trust
Image rourteoy El Musco del Barrio. NY
r.,, 1997 Tania Bruguera
PAGE 18'
KMAN
,1ura Jet Scale Model Flight and Pdper
Bombing Dwr Dance Flour
Fire and Ice Club. Miami, FL. US. 1984
Pilolo by Ana Pulido Bartlett
Image courtes tile artis:
Todos Estrellas (All Stars)
;La p/astica joven se dedica a/ baseball, par Ia
recreaci6n. Ia cu/tura fisica y el deporte I
ICuban Visual Artists Dedicate Themselves to
Baseball. For Recreation, Physical Culture and Sport!)
Jose Antonio Echeverria Sports Center. Vedado.
University of Havana. Havana. Cuba, 1989
Photo by Jose A. Figueroa
Gelatin silver print. 12 x 16
Image courtesy Jose A. Figueroa and Cristina Vives
PAGE 186
Tony Labat with Bruce Pollack
Bruce and Tony on the variety program The Gong Show
NBC Studios, Los Angeles, CA. US, October 28. 1979
Video still. Image courtesy Gallery Paule Anglim
PAGE 188
Fernando Garcia
BH/2. Miami. FL. US. 1981
Mixed media on printed map, 39 x 39
Permanent Collection of tile Miami-Dade
Public Library System
Image courtesy El Museu del Barrio. NY
Documentation photo by Jason Mandella
PAGE 191
leandro Solo
Mutante en Avcnirla O(Mutant at Avenue 0)
Avenue 0, Cienfuegos. Cuba. 1979
Photo-col lage. 37.5 x 28
Courtesy Cuban Performance Art of the 1980s
(Chronology). Collection Glexis Novoa
Image courtesy tile artist
/•uE 192
Arturo Cuenca
Castillo de Ia Real Fuer:a. Cicncia e ldao/ogia
ICastle of the Royal Force. Science vs. Ideology)
Castle of the Royal Fmce. Havana. Cuba. April- May 1989
Gelatin silver print. 19.75 x 14
Collection El Museo del Barrio
Gift of the artist with a ditional support from.
"PROARTISTA Sus1c1ininq the Work of Li ving
C ont e mp ~; a ry Artist\, .. il fund ftutn tlie Jacques ami
Nata,ha Gelrnan Trrt st
Image cnurleSi E11.1usen del Barri J, i'! r'
L 1989 Arturo Cuenca
PAGE 19B 'a'·:· r ·;-:" Jcec'ci r.1 '~ •:,'ef'· 1..:; _
Geo Ripley
ChorrPrdS rGJBS sabre fonda a.'ui
IRed Streams on a Blue Bacl... 'ounrl)
Escariche. Guadaliljard. Spilin. 1982
Photo IJy Rufino d ~ i.linHO
Image courtesy tile arti'
Silvano Lora
La Ruta de Hatuev(Hatuey's Route)
originally 1975 I reprised 1992
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Images courtesy Fundaci6n T~ller PCtbl irn Silvana LDril
Geo Ripley
El ancestro cone/ cuerpo pintado en raja
(Ancestor with Painted Red Body)
La Maison de /'Amerique La tine Dentro de Festival
Teatres et Vituel
La Maison des Cultures du Monde. Paris, France, 1989
Photo by Jean-Paul Durnontier.
Image courtesy the artist
PAGE 205
Regina Jose Galindo
1. Ouien puede borrar las hue/las 7
(Who Can Erase the Footprints 7)
Constitutional Court to National Palace of Guatemala
Guatemala City, 2003
Image courtesy the artist and prometeogallery de Ida Pisani
PAGE 208 (al;o reproduced on Contents pagel
Regina Jose Galindo
Lo voy a gritar a/ viento (I Will Shout it to the Wind)
II Festival of the Historic Center. Post Office Building
Guatemala City, Guatemala. 1999
Image courtesy the artist and prometeogallery de Ida Pisani
PAGE 21 5 (ALSO REPROOUCEU ON COtJTENTS PAGE)
Maria Teresa Hincapie
Vitrina IShop Window!
10 potJtico cotidiano I 10 Dail)' Poetics)
Encuentro Latinoamericano de Artc Popular
Bogota. Colombia. 1989. video sti ll
Image courtesy Galeria Casas Riegner
Pt.GE 216-?17
Maria Teresa Hincapie
Una Cosa es unJ Cusa (A Thing is 3 Thing)
JJ1d National Artists' Salon. Bogota. Colombia. 1990
video stills
Images courtesy Alcuadrddo Gallery
P. GE218
Maria Teresa Hincapie
llitrina (Shop Windofl·i
10 porJtico cotir!iJnnI 10 D.J'I; Pneti::s)
Em:ucntro L.J!inoamer/c,JIJO rf•' i\rie PopuiJf
Bogota. Colombia. 1989. video stt!l
Image courte y Gal.!riil Cas:ts Rieqner
r_,r, ·n
Maria Fern anda Cardoso
(in collaboration 'Ni!hThe Fabric Work hLp and k1us !1111)
Cardnso Flea C'i1 ws
The Fabric Workshop ami iVIuseum. Philadelphia. PA.
U.S.. 1997
Pho os by Will Brm'. n
Acrylic and oil on canvas. pigment on nylon wffeta .
>t:icus fabrics, "teel. Ltd>\ 1:dr· 1. '.d rio~J S Jl"1pS;n,J
fleas. 96 x 116 in cFameter
Collection all he Fabric Workshop and Museum
Images courte sy The Falmc Workshop and ~vl u seum
(!;_, 1aria Fernanda Cardoso and Casas Rei9ner Gallul'
PAGE22-1
Clemente Pad in
El artista debe estar a/ se1vicio de Ia comu11idad
(The Artist Must Se1ve the Commu11ity)
XVI Bienal de Sao Paulo. Brazil. 1981
Images courtesy the artist

317
 =--I

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 Arte -:1- Vida : Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960 - 2000

Authors Publication Credits

Maris Bustamante Edi ted by
Artist and Director Deborah Cullen
Centro de Artes, Humanidades y Ciencias
Transdisciplinarias, Mexico OJ Editorial Associate:

Claudia Cal irman Elvis Fuentes

New York-based independent scholar, curator,
Editorial Assistants
and author, Brazilian Art Under the Dictatorship
!forthcoming, Duke University Press) Elizabeth Borne
Arden Decker
Deborah Cullen Marisa Lerer
Director of Curatorial Programs
Rebeca Noriega-Costas
El Museo del Barrio, New York
Trinidad Fombel la
Elvis Fuentes and Andrea Ortuno
Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York

Sayuri Guzman Translations

Artist and independent curator Odile Cisneros
Dominican Republic
Publication Design
Marla Iovino
Elvira Moran
Independent scholar and curator
v •twelviradesigns.com
Bogota. Colombia
Printed and Bound by
Sharon Lerner Rizo-Patr6n
and Jorge Villacorta Chavez Amenkom Group
Professors, Pontificia Universidad
Cat61ica del Peru, Lima
] Ana Longoni
The Li rary · f Co:1gress
Card Catalogue Number: 2008926339
Professor, Universidad de Buenos Aires; ISBN 978-1-882454-25-9
Research Fellow at the National Research
] Council of Argentina
'f• 2008 El Museo del Barrio

Robert Neustadt .'II! riqhts reserved. No part of thi

} Professor, Northern Arimna Uni1ersity. Flaqs taff hnokmay lli! reproduced in ;my form
I , any means. r;luclmn'c or rT•PI hiir, ;cl l,
Virginia Perez-Ratton inc!•rrling phrJtrcorying, recorclinq,
fou nding Director. TEfiR'eT.cd. 0i!!l Jo>e. Coqd f1ica or !J,· an informa tion stnrfl[l8 'lnd
} Gabriela Rangel
ret neva! sys emwithout pcrmissinn
in ·:iting from ! e r.uhli:.ht'r
Director of Visual • rL
America. S ci~li. Ne :, Y.,r>
Printe' l and bound in Carmda
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Direc:or & CEO nrstnhrted by DAP.
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