ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 103– 6
my proposition . . . for members of the group to get rid of all “individual”
signatures was rejected, it was inevitable that the group should
disappear once individual success appeared.’ (Stein, Douze ans d’art
contemporain, p. 386.)
102 In a late article called ‘The Latest Exclusions’, Debord noted that the
group had recently ‘refused some fifty or sixty requests for admission –
which has spared us an equal number of exclusions.’ (Debord, in
Internationale Situationniste, 12, 1969, translated in Knabb [ed.], Situationist
International Anthology, p. 377.)
Chapter 4
Social Sadism Made Explicit
1 Boal was one of several influences on Argentinian theatre in the 1970s,
the others being Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Teatro
Pánico, and Tadeusz Kantor’s Theatre of Death.
2 For example, Roberto Jacoby was trained in sociology, Raúl Escari in
philosophy, and Eduardo Costa in literature and art history.
3 The ‘Dirty War’ of 1976– 83 was the darkest time in Argentina’s history.
The junta, led by General Videla, began a campaign to ‘purify’ the country
by imprisoning, torturing and executing leftists, trade unionists and
Peronists. Babies of the ‘disappeared’ were reallocated to military families.
Education, media and the arts were brought under the control of the
armed forces in every public institution. The works of Freud, Jung, Marx,
Darwin and many others were all banned from universities. Videla
famously stated that ‘In order to achieve peace in Argentina all the necessary
people will die.’
4 Masotta referenced Lacan’s work in an article for the journal Centro in
1959. In 1974 he founded the Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires,
modelled after Lacan’s École Freudienne de Paris. Masotta has only a
marginal presence in Andrea Giunta’s Avant- Garde, Internationalism and
Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007, and in Luis Camnitzer’s Conceptualism in Latin American Art:
Didactics of Liberation, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. He does
not feature at all in Waldo Rasmussen’s Latin American Artists of the
Twentieth Century, New York: MoMA, 1992.
5 Lucy Lippard visited Argentina in 1968, but does not credit Masotta for
the term ‘dematerialisation’ which became the focus of her 1973 publication
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object 1966– 1972, New
York: Praeger, 1973.
6 The ITDT was founded in 1958 as a cultural centre dedicated to avantgarde
art, theatre and music, in memory of the Italian- Argentine engineer
Torcuato Di Tella. See John King, El Di Tella y el desarrollo cultural
argentino en la década del sesanta, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone,
1985. For texts by Masotta, see El ‘Pop’ Art, Buenos Aires: Editorial
312