ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 127– 30
81 Some of the texts we think of as fundamental to Western art theory since
the 1960s were already known and received in South America. The work
of Merleau- Ponty was introduced to the Brazilian context in the late
1940s by art critic Mario Pedrosa, a good fifteen years before it was
harnessed by artists and critics in New York to explain the effect of viewing
minimalist sculpture. I have already mentioned Barthes and Lacan;
the latter was received in Argentina a decade before Lacanian theory
impacted upon Marxist- feminist critiques of vision in Europe in the
1970s. Moreover, the reception of Lacan in Argentina permeated many
aspects of culture and was not confined to academia, as continues to be
the case in Europe and North America.
82 Longoni and Mestman, Avant- Garde and Politics in Argentine ’68,
p. 122.
83 Ferrari, cited in ibid., p. 122.
84 Renzi, cited in ibid., p. 129.
85 In the final paragraphs of The Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord asserts
that ‘a critique capable of surpassing the spectacle must know how to bide
its time’ (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone Books,
1994, p. 154). Messianic Marxism proposes that the contradictions of
capitalism will in time become apparent and lead to its collapse; all we can
do is wait.
86 Jacoby, for example, returned to the sociological research he had abandoned
in 1965; Carnevale turned to teaching.
Chapter 5
The Social Under Socialism
1 ‘The spectacle exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the
necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports.
In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification
surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of
misery. . . . Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, so does the
police.’ (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York: Zone
Books, 1994, sections 63 and 64.)
2 Membership of the Union of Soviet Artists (founded 1957) was essential
for all artists working in the Soviet bloc, and was a means to bring artistic
practice under strict ideological supervision. Artists expelled from the
Union could not exhibit their work in galleries nor make money from
their creative activities.
3 IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. In the
case of this chapter, Czech artists had more contact with Germany (via
Jindřich Chalupecký), while Slovakian artists were more in touch with
developments in France (via Pierre Restany).
4 Of course, memories of class difference were not entirely erased. In ‘The
Power of the Powerless’, Václav Havel speaks of his social awkwardness
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