ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Brazil in that it tends to be a history of isolated gestures by artists without
a consistent oeuvre, trained in diverse backgrounds. 2 It is complicated
further by the interruptive character of increasingly coercive dictatorships
(the Revolución Argentina of General Onganía 1966– 70, General Levingston
1970– 71, and General Lanusse 1971– 73, and the ‘Dirty War’ of
1976– 83), each of which imposed new forms of censorship and inhuman
repression on its citizens. 3 Despite these discontinuities, Argentina’s early
reception of European semiotics and communications theory gave rise to
a consistent line of thinking among its artists. If the best examples of
Brazilian art during this period invite viewers to sense and to feel, their
Argentinian counterparts seem to demand that viewers think and analyse.
This specifically analytic approach – combined with a willingness to
subject participants to situations that have a distinctly brutal tenor –
ensures that this body of work offers a significant counterpart to
participatory art in North America and Western Europe. In the latter, the
immediacy of first- hand relationships amongst viewers is staked as a challenge
to the atomised social body of consumer capitalism, united only in
its isolation; in Argentina, this model – synonymous with the Happenings
– was challenged almost immediately and subjected to critical analysis via
structuralism and media theory.
I. Social Sadism Made Explicit
In some respects it is perverse to begin a case study on participation in
Argentinian art by discussing Oscar Masotta (1930– 79), a writer and intellectual
best known for introducing Lacanian psychoanalysis into Argentina.
He made only three works of art during his lifetime, and these are generally
overlooked as idiosyncratic experiments that stand as an exception to his
overall intellectual output. 4 And yet Masotta’s involvement with artistic
production in the early 1960s was extensive and influential: he was closely
engaged with contemporary art (writing key texts on Pop and coining the
term ‘dematerialisation’ 5 ) and organised a reading group for young artists,
while also teaching at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, the epicentre of
Argentinian avant- garde production in the 1960s. 6 Masotta’s theoretical
work was formative for the development of media art in Argentina and for
defining the country’s reception of the latest artistic imports from North
America. However, his intellectual formation was marked by an orientation
towards Europe, particularly France: after studying philosophy at the
University of Buenos Aires, he engaged with Marxism and existentialism in
the 1950s, reading Sartre and Merleau- Ponty in Les Temps modernes, and
writing for the leftist journal Contorno. 7 In the 1960s he turned to structural
linguistics and visual art, and his 1965 lecture ‘Pop Art and Semantics’
(Arte Pop y Semántica) is one of the earliest attempts to use linguistic analysis
in the interpretation of works of art.
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