ARTIFICIAL HELLS

social sadism made explicit
Pi Lind, Living Sculptures, 1968
works in ‘Experiencias 68’ as concerned with overcoming the space between
artist and viewer, traditionally occupied by the representational work of
art. Many of the artists in the exhibition, however, sought a more complex
approach to the dialectic of live/ mediated, as in Roberto Jacoby’s telex
machine that fed constant live reports from Agence France Presse on the
May ’68 demonstrations in Paris. Eventually, many of the artists destroyed
their own works when the police censored Plate’s installation: on May 23,
seven days after the opening of the exhibition, the rest of the artists withdrew
their pieces, hurling them out of the window into Florida Street in
protest at the censorship of Plate’s installation and the participation it had
generated.
Critics brought other complaints against the show, including the accusation
that Bony’s The Worker’s Family would have been more effective if
shown within a labour union; for one critic, exhibiting the work in a gallery
showed a refusal to communicate with a non- specialist public. 41 But instead
of taking art to the workers, Bony brought a fragment of the workers into
the exhibition – a gesture comparable to Robert Smithson’s contemporaneous
‘non- sites’ in which a fragment of an unbounded outdoor location is
removed and relocated to the gallery. Bony’s other concern was dematerialisation,
the predominant theme of ‘Experiencias 68’ as a whole following
Masotta’s lecture on this subject at the Instituto Di Tella in 1967. It is
worth recalling that in Argentina, dematerialisation referred less to the
115