ARTIFICIAL HELLS

social sadism made explicit
In 1966, Masotta led a reading group that met almost daily – at Di Tella,
in bars, at the Álvarez publishing house – and whose members included the
artists Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari, Juan Risuleo and the
sociologist Eliseo Verón. The group read and applied structural linguistics
and communications theory to works of art, visual imagery and their lived
context; the texts tackled included Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes,
Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Claude Lévi- Strauss, Gregory Bateson and
Roman Jakobson. 8 The reading group took place alongside the formation
of El Grupo de los Artes de los Medios Masivos (Group of Mass Media Art,
1966– 68), whose best- known production was an ‘anti- Happening’ in July
1966, known variously as Primera obra de arte de los medios (The First Work
of Media Art), Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead
Boar) or Participación Total (Total Participation). Authored by Jacoby,
Escari and Costa with the participation of nine other artists (including
Marta Minujín and Masotta), the work directly responded to the way in
which the term ‘Happening’ had become a buzzword in the media. 9 The
three artists issued a press release announcing the Happening, together
El Grupo de los Artes de los Medios Masivos, Total Participation, 1966, newspaper intervention
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