ARTIFICIAL HELLS

4
Social Sadism Made Explicit
Western interest in Argentinian art of the 1960s has only begun to be felt in
the last decade: the country’s leading figures, such as León Ferrari, are still
not as established in Europe and North America as they should be, and
individual artists are less well known than the names of the collective
projects they participated in, such as Tucumán Arde (Tucumán is Burning)
(1968). My focus in this chapter will be on the specifically conceptual forms
of participatory art that were developed in Buenos Aires in the mid 1960s
under the influence of Oscar Masotta, and on the Rosario Group’s Ciclo de
Arte Experimental (Cycle of Experimental Art, 1968). As a second bridge
between artistic actions and left politics, I will discuss the theatrical innovations
of the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1931– 2009), who developed
an influential mode of theatrical therapy geared towards social change
while in exile in Argentina in the 1970s. 1 Although these two bodies of
work were not known to each other at the time, they share common artistic
strategies: taking reality and its inhabitants as a material, and the desire to
politicise those who encountered this work. However, the artists did not
abandon an attachment to the value of artistic experience – each practitioner
felt him/ herself to be working politically, but within art – while
Boal’s priority was the revolution itself. In this he was more akin to the
Situationist International, who rejected art as an institutionally framed
category of bourgeois experience in favour of social change; the premise of
Boal’s innovations, however, was to devise new modes of public education
and to build the confidence of those in participating in this process.
These participatory actions produced in Argentina stand in sharp
contrast to the better known and more canonical artistic experiments
produced in Brazil during this period, in which the cool constructive forms
of European abstraction are redirected towards a liberatory experience of
colour, texture and intermediary objects. If the master narrative of Brazilian
art was (and to a large extent remains) the sensuous, then Argentinian
work is more cerebral and self- reflexive; its performances are less visually
oriented, and more willing to tarry with nihilistic consequences of producing
coercive situations. The ’60s scene in Argentina also differs from
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