Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

186 Rubén Gallo
atropellado and El secuestro recall projects by American activist collectives
like the Guerrilla Girls, the Art Worker’s Coalition (AWC), and Artists
and Writers Protest (AWP). In 1969, for example, AWC and AWP staged a
“Mass Anti-[Vietnam] War Mail-in” addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For this action, group members—including Lucy R. Lippard—stood in line
at the post ofWce and Xaunted their packages, which included a papier-mâché
bomb; they carried body bags inscribed with the number of American and
Vietnamese casualties; and, in a strategy that could be fruitfully contrasted
to Proceso Pentágono’s fake kidnapping in Mexico City, members of the
AWC mailed an invitation to a meeting to discuss “plans to kidnap Kissinger”—an
event that attracted the attention of the FBI. 37
Other projects by Proceso Pentágono seem closer in spirit to North
American examples of institutional critique. The publication of Expediente
Bienal X, for example, follows many of the same strategies deployed by Hans
Haacke in his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees (1974).
Haacke’s project consisted of displaying a series of simple text panels tracing
the business connections of the Guggenheim trustees. It showed, for
instance, that two museum trustees and a Guggenheim family member served
on the board of the Kennecott Copper Company, a transnational corporation
that owned many Chilean mines and that had been criticized by Salvador
Allende as draining the country’s resources. 38 This simple presentation of
research demonstrated that the Guggenheim Museum, far from being an
apolitical art institution—as its director, Thomas Messer, had claimed during
the 1971 controversy generated by the cancellation of Haacke’s Shapolsky
et al. project (“this museum,” he wrote, “was not to engage in extra-artistic
activities or sponsor social or political causes”)—was in fact sustained by
individuals with very clear and very powerful political connections. 39
Out of Proceso Pentágono’s many anti-institutional projects, the
publication of Expediente Bienal X was closest in spirit to Haacke’s Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees. Both of these projects transform
art into information; both unearth data about the individuals behind art
institutions; and they both demonstrate that museums and biennales are
never apolitical but, on the contrary, attempt to conceal their political afWliation
behind a screen of artistic autonomy. Haacke demonstrated that the
Guggenheim Museum was Wnancially linked to Pinochet’s repressive regime,
while Proceso Pentágono proved that the Paris Biennale was institutionally
tied to Uruguay’s military dictatorship. In both cases, these projects brought
to light what the art institutions had concealed as “extra-artistic” matters.
There are also some important differences: while Haacke never
managed to show his “real-time social systems” at the Guggenheim, Proceso
Pentágono did show Pentágono at the Biennale and used this experience as