ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 117– 9
‘Un mongoloide “esposto” alla biennale de Venezia’, ‘La mostra degli orrori’)
reveal more about the small- minded discomfort of the press than offering
a serious consideration of De Dominicis’ metaphysical proposition.
46 Bony, cited in Instituto Di Tella Experiencias 68, p. 79, my translation.
Camnitzer notes that for Bony, The Worker’s Family was ‘in lieu of the
work of art and not the art itself’. (Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin
American Art, p. 178 and p. 296, note 17.)
47 Revista Análisis, cited in Instituto Di Tella Experiencias 68, p. 76, my
translation.
48 Bony interviewed in La Maga magazine, Buenos Aires, 16 June 1993; p.
11, cited in Longoni and Mestman, Avant- Garde and Politics in Argentine
’68, p. 80.
49 After May ’68 Bony ceased to make art and became a rock photographer,
shooting album covers for bands such as La Joven Guardia, Arco Iris,
Manal and Los Gatos. During this decade Jacoby was also involved in
rock music, writing lyrics for the band Virus and as artistic director of
their live stage shows. In 1975 Bony returned to painting after this selfproclaimed
‘artistic suicide’.
50 Minujín’s archive contains numerous letters of feedback from the participants,
in response to a questionnaire sent out by the artist. They describe
their experiences, and most are rapturously enthusiastic: going to a mock
birthday party, a cocktail lounge, a reception for Mott the Hoople, a haircutting
salon. Each ‘adventure’ was accompanied by a photographer.
(Marta Minujín archive, Buenos Aires.)
51 The Braque Prize (inaugurated in 1964) was organised by the French
Embassy, who in 1968 added an extra page of regulations to the call for
applications, in which it was stated that the organisers held the right ‘to
make all necessary changes’ to the works proposed. In other words, they
reserved the right to censor works of art.
52 Graciela Carnevale, interview with the author, Rosario, 8 December
2009. It should be stressed that the whole international scene was influential
on the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, and not just European
theory: the Vietnam War, the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara, and El
Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (the movement of
priests for the third world).
53 Longoni and Mestman, Avant- Garde and Politics in Argentine ’68, p. 109,
p. 113.
54 Puzzolo’s event lasted from 28 May to 8 June 1968. See Juan Pablo Renzi’s
account in LHN, pp. 303– 4.
55 Longoni and Mestman, Avant- Garde and Politics in Argentine ’68, p. 110.
Bonina’s event lasted from 1– 13 July 1968.
56 Ibid., p. 111. The work is one of many closed gallery works of this period,
including Robert Barry’s During the Exhibition the Gallery Will be Closed
(1969).
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