ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
more light- hearted pop sensibility (such as Marta Minujín and Rubén
Santantonín’s elaborate installation La Menesunda, 1965), Minujín’s solo
work has an aggressivity belied by her colourful persona and fashionable
media presence, in structure if not always in realisation. One of her later
works makes a direct link between aggressive forms of participation and
the political context of Argentina itself: in Kidnappenings, held over three
evenings at MoMA in 1973, ninety participants volunteered to be kidnapped,
blindfolded and subjected to a range of experiences devised by assorted artworld
volunteers, their faces painted in the style of Picasso’s paintings, in
reference to his recent death. 50 This combination of glitzy pop chic and
allusions to a political framework of repression is somewhat uneasy, and
arguably tells us more about Minujín’s self- exploitation for a US audience
than it does about the specific tenor of participatory art produced in Argentina.
In that country during the 1960s, the combined pressures of military
dictatorship and an imported European intellectual heritage gave rise to a
singular mode of participatory art in that country, which transformed the
celebratory immediacy of the Happenings into an intellectual framework
of mediated constraint, manipulation and negation.
III. The Closed Gallery, the Scuffle, the Prison
This coercive new approach to participation is played out most vividly in
the Ciclo de Arte Experimental (Cycle of Experimental Art), organised by
the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia (Group of Avant- Garde Artists) in
the city of Rosario between May and October 1968. The group initially
formed out of a desire for autonomy: to have their own space to exhibit, to
organise their own shows, and to write about their own work – in short, to
be their own curators and critics, rather than being dependent on institutional
infrastructures. Although the Cycle was developed by the artists
working individually, the group was in daily discussion, and their increasingly
ambitious actions reflect the group’s politicisation as the year went
on, given impetus by their opposition to the Braque Prize (June 1968), the
assault on Romero Brest’s lecture (July 1968), and the National Encounter
of Avant- Garde Art (in August 1968), which led to Tucumán Arde
(discussed below). 51 Like artists in Buenos Aires, the group were voracious
consumers of literature and theory, and Brecht was a particular obsession,
along with Barthes, McLuhan, Lévi- Strauss, Marcuse, Marx (who they
read in the original), and Eco’s The Open Work. 52
The Cycle took the form of a series of ten actions, one every fifteen
days, many of which appropriated social forms, behaviours and relations.
As Ana Longoni has argued, most of the events were based on a common
idea: withdrawing from institutional spaces, finding new audiences, and
merging art with the praxis of life by ‘working on the audience as the privileged
material of artistic action’. 53 The first event in the Cycle, by Norberto
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