ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 106– 9
Columba, 1967, and Happening, Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez,
1967, extracts of which are translated in Inés Katzenstein (ed.), Listen,
Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant- Garde, New
York: MoMA, 2004, hereafter referred to as LHN.
7 This synthetic aspect of his work is not given enough credit in Philip
Derbyshire’s ‘Who Was Oscar Masotta?’, Radical Philosophy, November–December
2009, pp. 11– 23. Derbyshire condescendingly dismisses
Masotta as ‘the bearer of the European message’ (p. 12).
8 Of these, Barthes and Saussure had particular impact, especially Barthes’
Mythologies (1957), which was central to the group’s critical demystification
of the Happenings. (Roberto Jacoby, interview with the author,
Buenos Aires, 5 December 2009.)
9 Kaprow declared Buenos Aires to be a ‘city of happenistas’, although he
never actually visited Argentina. Lebel visited and made work in Buenos
Aires (Venceremos) and Montevideo (Hommage à Lautréamont) in April
1967, but his work was already well known to Argentinian artists who
had lived in Paris, such as Marta Minujín who performed in his Tableaux-
Happenings (1964). See Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Avant- Garde
and Politics in Argentine ’68: The Itinerary Towards Tucumán Arde (unpublished
English translation of Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán arde’. Vanguardia
artística y política en el 68 argentino, Buenos Aires: El Cielo por Asalto
Ediciones, 2000), p. 52. The present chapter is indebted to this groundbreaking
study; many thanks to Ana Longoni for making the unpublished
English translation of her book available to me.
10 See Roberto Jacoby and Eduardo Costa, ‘Creation of the First Work’, in
LHN, pp. 225– 9.
11 Minujín first went to New York in 1965, where she met Warhol, who she
claims had already heard of her following the scandal of her Suceso
Plástico in Uruguay (discussed below), reported in the New York Times.
The Long Shot was an environmental installation into which Minujín
added the live component of rabbits and flies, enclosed in transparent
cages; the work is described in detail by Masotta in ‘Three Argentinians
in New York’ (1966), in LHN, pp. 185– 90.
12 The aim of the event was already to play with the different temporalities
of mediated information, gathering together ‘several Happenings that
had already happened into one Happening’, to tell the story of Happenings’
‘historical progression’. Masotta confessed that he was more excited
by the information about events than by the events themselves. (Masotta,
cited in Longoni and Mestman, ‘After Pop, We Dematerialise: Oscar
Masotta, Happenings, and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism’,
in LHN, p. 162.)
13 Roberto Jacoby, ‘Against the Happening’, in LHN, p. 230.
14 Masotta, ‘I Committed a Happening’, LHN, p. 200.
15 Ibid., p. 191.
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