ARTIFICIAL HELLS

social sadism made explicit
centre of the city, and to a little known, abandoned railway station at
Anchorena, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The first group were treated
to an event with live music and film screenings (more akin to expanded
cinema), after which the bus took them to Anchorena; their journey was
timed to arrive just too late to see a helicopter overhead, purportedly carrying
the film star Beatriz Matar. The second group, meanwhile, had seen the
helicopter, and described this event to the group from Theatrón. In other
words, Masotta staged a missed encounter, dividing the audience into those
who did and didn’t see the helicopter. 33 Participation, in this instance, is
divisive and negative, based around an absence of participation: missing an
event and needing to recover this information through dialogue. The point
was a fragmentation and a lack of unified experience, a discontinuity that
interrupted the communicational flow. 34 To this extent, The Helicopter
fulfils Masotta’s claim, made a year later in ‘After Pop, We Dematerialise’,
that ‘there was something within the Happening that allowed us to glimpse
the possibility of its own negation’. 35
II. Artist as Torturer
Masotta’s To Induce the Spirit of the Image received no press coverage at the
time, since it took place in a small rehearsal space at Di Tella, rather than as
part of the official programme. However, Oscar Bony’s response to this
work the following year attracted a great deal of media controversy. We
could view Bony’s La Familia Obrera (The Worker’s Family, 1968) as a
condensation of Masotta’s happening and Greco’s Vivo- Ditos. At the same
time, it stands as an isolated example within Bony’s overall work. First
shown in the controversial exhibition ‘Experiencias 68’ at the Instituto Di
Tella, the performance comprises a working- class family – an Argentinian
man, woman and child – sitting on a platform for eight hours a day. 36 The
family responded to a job advertisement in the local paper and were paid to
sit on a plinth throughout the opening hours of the exhibition, accompanied
by a recording of everyday sounds made in the home of the same
family. The label accompanying the piece, written by Bony, explained that
‘Luis Ricardo Rodríguez, a professional die- caster, is earning twice his
usual wages for just staying on show with his wife and son.’ In photographic
documentation of the project, the Rodríguez family are shown
self- absorbed, reading books to pass the time of day while visitors examine
them. In reality, their gestures were less contained: they were constantly
shifting position in the middle of the exhibition hall – eating, smoking,
reading and talking amid the audience’s largely adverse and horrified
response; the child in particular found it hard to stay put on the plinth and
often ran around the exhibition. 37 Although reviewers framed the work
within contemporary discussions around Pop Art, The Worker’s Family
clearly plays on the conventions of figurative art in a socialist
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