Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
aesthetic programme, since it was pointless for artists to suppress their area
of expertise (‘Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming ambiguous and, as a
consequence, of losing effi cacy’). 84 For the SI, by contrast, artistic competence
had no role in advancing the Revolution (which at any rate, was
messianically distant and had to ‘bide its time’); they conceived their alternatives
to art as anticipating the consequences of revolutionary upheaval,
rather than paving the way towards it. 85 For the artists in Rosario, artistic
expertise was their most powerful weapon, not something to be rejected or
surpassed. The interdisciplinary research project Tucumán Arde, the main
outcome of the National Encounter of Avant- garde Art, was the fi nal
attempt by Argentinian artists to redirect art towards political ends; but
Tucumán Arde, for all its political clarity, left only one option for the viewer:
the Marxist re- education of his or her perspective on society. The other
artistic examples I have discussed in this chapter present more open- ended
models for reimagining art’s relationship to a leftist political imaginary.
After this moment, the dictatorship grew increasingly surreal and deadly
and many artists either sought exile or took other jobs. 86 In the 1970s, such
experimentation was forcibly halted, and replaced by public demonstrations
by women’s movements, most famously the Madres de Plaza de Mayo
(1977–), whose collective grief found vivid ways to visualise protest at the
seemingly interminable state kidnappings and torture.
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