ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
ephemerality of works of art (as per Lippard’s classic reading of US conceptualism,
in which dematerialisation denotes an ‘escape’ from the market
system), than to the diffusion and circulation of art in the mass media. At
the same time, we should be mindful of the different ways in which dematerialisation
was manifested in Argentinian art: works that existed solely in
the media (such as the Happening for a Dead Boar) are significantly different
to Bony’s The Worker’s Family, which attracted media attention but
primarily takes the form of a live material presence (the human body) and
exists today as a large- scale, framed black and white photograph, prominently
displayed in the collection of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de
Buenos Aries (MALBA).
Bony’s work, however radical in its use of people as a medium, could
also be said to restrict itself to rather conservative means: exchanging the
fixed contours of traditional figurative sculpture for the live human being.
The work is similar to a number of other delegated performances that
attempted to stage this exchange in the late 1960s, such as Living Sculptures
by the Swedish theatre director and writer Pi Lind, who in 1967 placed
around twenty people on plinths in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, for
nine hours a day for five days. The event was conceived as a series of
portraits, each of which was accompanied by a text panel indicating specific
information about each person: their name, age, sex, profession, education,
economic background, family history, pets, religion, and so on. A wide
variety of Swedish citizens were on display, including a teacher, a photographer,
a housewife, a Vietnam activist, a father- to- be, and a girl with a St
Bernard dog. In an interview with the press, Pi Lind described the whole
thing as a ‘sociological exhibition’ or a wild mix between a ‘beauty fair and
social realism’. 42 Images and press cuttings of the exhibition indicate a relatively
seamless continuity between the performers and audience, arguably
reflecting the social equilibrium of Scandinavian social democracy. By
contrast, the specificity of Bony’s provocation lies in its emphatic pointing
to a particular social demographic and their payment: the working- class
family were paid to work a full eight- hour day, in front of a gallery audience.
Work – as activity and payment – is the subject of the piece as much
as the representation of an ‘ideal’ or exemplary family unit.
The apparent ‘normality’ of Bony’s family could also be contrasted to
the display of Paolo Rosa, a man with Down’s Syndrome, at the 1972
Venice Biennale as part of a live installation by the Italian artist Gino De
Dominicis. 43 Entitled The Second Solution of Immortality (The Universe is
Motionless) (1972), the installation comprises a person affected by Down’s
Syndrome seated on a chair, gazing at a beach ball and a rock placed on the
ground before him/ her. Each of these components have their own
extremely long titles: the beach ball is Rubber ball (fallen from a height of
two meters) at the instant immediately prior to its rebound, while the rock is
titled Waiting for a general random molecular movement in a single direction to
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