Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

occasion of the show. The same year we were both invited to participate in an exhibit in the
Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires. One piece of mine was to print on the big street window,
taking the place of a title for the whole exhibit, the phrase “Arte Colonial Contemporáneo”
(Contemporary Colonial Art), thus appropriating and criticizing the show itself. In the show
room I had an area defined as “common grave” with tape and stenciled letters, and “fragment
of a friend” stenciled on the angle of wall and floor, taking the position of a fallen body. This
addressed directly the Argentine dictatorship. The Institute also sent out four mail-exhibits
with cards bearing instructions on what to do with them, all the usages being (poetically) antidictatorship.
Liliana Porter approached things in a less overt political fashion. She had painted
shadows of people looking at the wall where they were painted, so that real shadows mixed
with painted ones and everything cancelled out. Her mailings were shadows printed on cards
to be completed with the objects (a glass, an olive, etc.).
When we were invited, as The New York Graphic Workshop, to exhibit in the “Information”
show, we faced the conundrum of being co-opted into the mainstream. At the same time
we were aware that it was career-suicide to turn the invitation down. Our solution was to
announce a mail exhibit in the museum, have people put their address on envelopes provided
there, and have the museum mail them the mail piece. The announcement sheet said: “The
New York Graphic Workshop announces its mail-exhibition #14.” The mailed piece was the
exact sheet with only one letter changed: instead of “announces” it said “announced.” We felt
that with that we were in it without being in it and that we may upset the Museum’s budget
(we never found out how many mailings they had to make on our behalf). So, when I said
“help create a politically active and enlightened public” I meant it in relatively quiet and intimate
way, not thinking of mass rallies.
B.S.: Can you tell me more about the Instituto Di Tella and its role during the later
1960s in the development of what has come to be called “Latin American Conceptualism”?
L.C.: The Institute was an offspring of the Di Tella conglomerate, a company which
produced a wide range of products including a variation of Fiat cars. The institute was created
in 1958 and had several divisions, including music under Ginastera, an industrial design sector
that looked up to the Design School of Ulm (the director of Ulm, succeeding Max Bill in
1956, was Tomás Maldonado, a prestigious Argentine painter) and visual arts, directed by
Jorge Romero Brest, which started in 1960. Romero Brest was the most charismatic and, in
certain ways, influential art theoretician in Latin America. He was extremely eloquent, challenging,
eccentric, vaguely Marxist in his thought structure, successfully flirtatious with upper
society ladies and a cynic. He formed many of the more important art critics of the generation
blake stimson “dada—situationism/tupamaros—conceptualism” 495