History of Art Literature Anthologies
Click here to see all the anthologies reviewed in the series
Jessica Lack
Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos
London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017, 502 pages
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| Fig. 2) The catalogue of the Frankfurt am Main exhibition in 2017-2018 |
In the first part of this post, we saw how the anthology of Jessica
Lack took into consideration the writings of those artists who advocated
aesthetic criteria different and often opposed to those of Western art. To the
development of what the author calls World
Art contributed both artists living in Asia, Africa and Latin America as
well as those from the ethnic minorities present in Europe and in the United
States. Of Western art they rejected both the individualist conception and the
attention to formal aspects. The author of Why
Are We 'Artists? aimed to offer us a post-colonial reading of art,
affirming the marginality of Western creations, in such a way that the end result
would be a true global art. I have read the anthology with great interest and
respect. At the same time I have asked myself a question: can we really talk about
World Art - that is, about global art
– if we exclude an important part of humankind and try to make of Europe and
North America a new periphery of aesthetic creation? Indeed, the question I am
raising is obviously political, in nature, exactly as are the theses of the
anthology of Jessica Lack: at least in my opinion, artistic production is
already now one of the most progressed features of the coexistence between
peoples, and their dialogue is developing in terms of equal dignity. I feel
contemporary art should be seen as a golden field to develop positively interconnections
and globalism, not to foster exclusions (even if, in the case of this anthology,
to the detriment of the economically dominant areas of the world).
It is not a matter of complaining about a crime of lese-majesty (in
reality, the manifestos of Western aesthetic movements are present in other collections
of texts), but rather of stressing that Jessica Lack’s interpretation of is one of many diverse readings of what happened in the
last century. Certainly, it is an interesting interpretation, because it helps
us to understand the motivations of many non-Western artists and is obviously
in line with some geopolitical developments of our time (the will of the emerging extra-European powers to design a new geographical map of international
politics). But are there other legitimate readings of global contemporary art?
Jessica Lack. A brief
history of art in Latin America in the twentieth century through thirteen manifestos
Just over ten percent of the 100 manifestos in Why Are We 'Artists'? come from the region of the world that speaks
Spanish and Portuguese on the American continent. Here is the list of the
thirteen texts:
1 - Arte Madí - Madí manifesto
(1947)
2 - Grupo Ruptura – Ruptura
(Breaking) Manifesto (1952)
3 - El Techo de la Ballena - For
the reconstruction of magma (1961)
4 - Alberto Greco - Vivo-Dito (Living
Finger) Manifesto (1963)
5 - Arte de los medios de Comunicación Masivos - Art of the Mass Media (1966)
6 - The Group of avant-garde artists - The Tucumán burns Manifesto (1968)
7 - Eduardo Costa - The Useful
Art Manifesto (1969)
8 - Grupo Vértebra – The Vertebra
Manifesto (1970)
9 - Artur Barrio - MUD / MEAT SEWER (1970)
10 - Grupo Antillano - Manifesto (1978)
11 - Colectivo de Acciones de Arte - Statement by the CADA Group (1982)
12 - Frente 3 de Fevereiro - Manifesto
of the 3rd February Front (2004)
13 - Tania Bruguera and the International Movement of Migrants -
Manifesto of migrants (2012)
The texts testify how Latin American artists lived in permanent
tension between three diverse moods. They might be the original source of new
trends destined to have an impact worldwide (think of the spread of so-called Madism – from Madí Art – in Europe during
the early fifties); they might feel part of an international antagonist art
(we'll talk about the artistic provocations of Alberto Greco); finally, they might
feel part of a region that, due to dictatorships, had remained at the margins
of the global art community (think of the Declaration
of the Cada group). The curators of the recent Frankfurt exhibition
witnessed all these trends, but let the idea prevail that the art of Latin
America was able to generate a creative dialogue with other regions of the
world. Thus, for example, they showed Alberto Greco’s black paintings in the same room with Piero Manzoni’s achromic works and Yves Klein’s blue
pictures, all symbols of the same research between conceptualism and art informel held at the end of the fifties.
In short, I would like to read the passages of Jessica Lack's anthology on
Latin America not as a testimony to a break between that world and ours, but
rather as evidence that, despite all vicissitudes, just Latin America was the meeting
point between the various sensibilities of our planet.
The Madí art manifesto (1947) [80]
The manifesto therefore differentiated between past art
(characterized by “a scholastic,
idealistic historicism, an irrational concept, an academic technique, a false,
static and unilateral composition, a work lacking in essential utility, [and] a consciousness paralysed by insoluble
contradictions; impervious to the permanent renovation in technique and style”
[86]) and Madí art. “Madí stands against all this. It confirms
man’s constant all absorbing desire to invent and construct objects within
absolute eternal human values, in his struggle to construct a new classless
society, which liberates energy, masters time and space in all senses, and
dominates matter to the limit” [87].
The manifesto of the Ruptura (Breaking) Group (1952)
With the Ruptura Group (Breaking
Group) we are moving to São Paulo, Brazil. The manifesto was compiled by the artist
and theorist of experimentalism Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973), an Italian-born
citizen who emigrated to Brazil in 1949 after his studies at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Rome. With him, the manifesto was also signed by Geraldo de Barros
(1923-1998), Lothar Charoux (1912-1987), Kazmer Féjer (1923-1989), Leopoldo
Haar (1910-1954), Luis Sacilotto (1924-2003) and Anatol Władysław (1913- 2004).
The text theorized a form of “pure
abstraction, widely known as Concretism, which the group based on mathematical
and rational principles” [88]. Jessica Lack wrote: “Cordeiro wanted to create a kind of Brazilian Bauhaus in São Paulo,
where experimental art, technology, architecture and design could work together
to support Brazil’s rapid industrialization” [89]. This functionalist
vision and the rejection of all forms of subjectivity were a source of tension
between the Ruptura Group and the
so-called neo-concrete artists, who opened to a “a greater sensuality in abstract art” [90].
The text of the manifesto was very short (it took the form of a
flyer). The signatories railed against the scientific principles of Renaissance
naturalism, the Leonardesque logics, and the process by which the painter would
reproduce the three-dimensional world in the two dimensions. As in the previous
case of Madí, they also rejected the
avant-gardes of the early decades of the twentieth century (Expressionists,
Surrealist, primitivisms) because they were still associated with the ancient
world. The new art had instead to be based on space-time, movement and matter
[91]. Art is “a means of knowledge
deducible from concepts, situating it above opinion and demanding, for its
review, a previous knowledge” [92].
The manifesto of the collective Roof
of the Whale (1961) [93]
We were here in Venezuela, where the anarchist artistic-literary
collective El Techo de la Ballena, (The
Roof of the Whale) disputed from extreme left-wing positions the
central-moderate government running the country in those years. The Roof of the Whale organized extremely
radical performances, such as Homenaje a
la Necrofilia, i.e. "Homage to necrophilia" in 1962, where bodies
of animals were quartered in front of the public, and at the same time
paintings such as "Study for
Executioner and Dog" by Carlos Contramaestre, 1933-1996 (I am not showing
it in order not to hurt readers' sensitivity). The poem “For the Restitution of Magma” was the collective fruit of the
group, a programmatic text which sang the merits of informal art.
It is necessary to
reconstruct magma
the boiling matter
the luxury of lava
to place a piece of fabric at the foot of a volcano
to restore the world
the luxury of lava
to show the matter is more lucid than colour
in this way the amorphous cuts away at the superfluous that prevents reality from transcending
it overcomes the immediacy of matter as a means of expression
the luxury of lava
to place a piece of fabric at the foot of a volcano
to restore the world
the luxury of lava
to show the matter is more lucid than colour
in this way the amorphous cuts away at the superfluous that prevents reality from transcending
it overcomes the immediacy of matter as a means of expression
making it
not an instrument of implementation
but an active medium that explodes
impact
matter transcends itself
matter transcends itself
textures tremble
rhythms draw vertigo
violence presides over the act of creation
and leaves evidence of what is
not an instrument of implementation
but an active medium that explodes
impact
matter transcends itself
matter transcends itself
textures tremble
rhythms draw vertigo
violence presides over the act of creation
and leaves evidence of what is
magma must be restored in
its decline …
informalism returns it to the essence of creation activity
reestabilishes categories and relationships that science has already foreseen
informalism also has its own fungus
the beat of arbitrary matter that can be seen even by the most incredulous eyes
the possibility of creation is as evident and real as the earth and rock that shape mountains
because it is necessary to restore magma
the boiling matter
adam’s [sic] prosthesis [94]
informalism returns it to the essence of creation activity
reestabilishes categories and relationships that science has already foreseen
informalism also has its own fungus
the beat of arbitrary matter that can be seen even by the most incredulous eyes
the possibility of creation is as evident and real as the earth and rock that shape mountains
because it is necessary to restore magma
the boiling matter
adam’s [sic] prosthesis [94]
With Alberto Greco (1931-1965) we are coming across with one of the
forerunners of the intersection between informal painting (with his 1960 black paintings, already mentioned for their
affinities with Klein and Manzoni) and conceptual art in Argentina. However, Greco had made himself known -
also in Europe - above all for his performances, which were also veritable acts
of provocation. After a series of these, in 1963, Greco was even expelled from
Italy! On June 16, 1962 he threw some rats painted in blue and silver in the
crowd, when the President of the Republic Antonio Segni was inaugurating the
Venice Biennale, claiming to protest against the art hosted at the exhibition.
On that occasion he gave false personal details (claiming he was the Venezuelan
painter Francisco Valero La Cruz [96]). He then dressed up as a nun, making
himself known in Rome on the occasion of the opening of the Second Vatican
Council. Then he filled Rome’s city centre with the writing “Painting is over. Long life to the Living
Finger art”. Finally, during the happening Christ 63 [97], an avant-garde performance written by the actor and
screenwriter Carmelo Bene (1937-2002) and presented in the latter’s Theatre Laboratory, he urinated from the
stage on the Argentine ambassador and wife (they had come specially to see
him), causing the arrival of the police, the permanent closure of the theatre
and the conviction of Bene to eight suspended months in prison.
The manifesto (whose full title, in an broken Italian, was Manifesto Dito dell'Arte Vivo) - as
explained by Jessica Lack - was first published in Genoa in 1962 and then
revised and republished in Piedralaves, Spain, in 1963. Greco wrote : “Vivo-Dito art is the adventure of the real,
the urgent document, the direct and total contact with things, places, people,
creating situations, creating the unexpected. It means showing and encountering
the object in its own place. Totally in accord with cinema, reportage, and
literature as a living document. Reality without touch ups or artistic
transformation. Today I am more interested in anyone at all recounting his life
on the street or in a streetcar than in any polished, technical account by a
writer. That is why I believe in painting without painters and in literature
without writers. This explains why, in recent years, the visual arts have
consciously found recourse in chance. It is a way of discovering the other side
of reason” [98].
The expression Vivo-Dito
(Living Finger) indicated the creative act, since the painter renounced
painting and decided to use his finger to indicate aspects of the reality he was
observing, defining it as art. Since the fifties, Greco distributed leaflets or
hung posters in Buenos Aires to praise his own performances, then he let
photograph himself while showing signboards praising his art, finally he blocked
people in the street and drew circles with chalk around them.
All this may seem simply the work of a wild artist but eventually
had an important impact both on the spread of performance art beyond the United
States, where it was born in the late fifties, and on the identification of the
ephemeral nature of art. Greco concluded: “A
work has meaning as long as it is made as a total adventure, without knowing
what is going to happen. Once it’s finished, it doesn’t matter anymore, it has
become a corpse. So let it rest in peace. The contemporary artist has lost his
sense of eternity” [99].
The manifesto Art of Mass Media (1966) [100]
The three Argentine conceptual artists Eduardo Costa (1940-),
Roberto Jacoby (1944-) and Raúl Escari (1944-) created the group Arte del los Medios de Comunicación Masivos (Art of Mass Media) in 1966. The July manifesto of that year -
inspired by the theories of the Argentine Marxist intellectual Oscar Masotta
(1930-1979) and the Canadian sociologist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) as well
as the Korean media artist Nam June Paik (1932-2006) - intended to propose to
make art through the media. As Jessica Lack explains, “the group sent out a press release describing a collective happening in
which a number of distinguished people participated. The event was duly
recorded in the media, only for it to be revealed later that the happening had
never taken place, giving rise to various discussions in the press as to
whether it was intended as a sociological experiment, a conceptual artwork or a
literary joke” [101]. It was the “Happening
for a dead boar”: with the help of some personalities known to the public, the
signatories created written and photographic documentation on a performance
that in reality had never been held, but which was documented in many prominent
Argentinian newspapers and tabloids.
“In a civilization dominated
by the mass media – this was how the manifesto started – the public has no direct contact with
cultural events, only with information about them in the media. The mass
media’s audiences do not view an art exhibition, nor do they witness a
happening or attend a soccer game; instead, they receive reports of these
spectacles in news broadcasts. Thus, real artistic events lose their importance
because they reach only a very few people due to a lack of dissemination” [102]. “Today the work of art is the product of a
process that begins with the (traditional) making of the work and goes on until
it becomes material transmitted by the mass media. Now we are proposing a ‘work
of art’ in which the moment of the making disappears. Hence, the work becomes a
commentary on the fact that it actually is a pretext to launch the process of
information” [103].
The Tucumán Burns manifesto (1968) [104]
In the sixties, Argentine politics was characterized by a succession
of unproductive elections and army coups. From 1966 to 1973, power was managed
by a coalition of militaries and politicians under the name of "Revolución Argentina", with the
external support of the United States and a clear anti-Communist program. The Artistas de vanguardia group, made up of
about thirty young artists, was created in 1968; the members aimed to reject
the artistic avant-garde experiments of previous years (which they considered
vacuous) and instead directed art in the sense of political opposition. Roberto
Janocby, one of the three signatories of the already-mentioned manifesto of the Art of the mass media, also participated in
the initiative. As Jessica Lack wrote, “the
group began by launching a project to investigate and protest against appalling
living and working conditions in the province of Tucumán in north-west
Argentina, where the government’s economic policy had recently led to the
forced closure of the region’s large state-owned sugar mills, leaving many
inhabitants destitute and starving. They
initiated their campaign by fly-posting the major cities of Rosario and Santa
Fe with the mysterious words ‘Tucumán arde’ (Tucumán is burning). Than they announced to the press the staging of
the First Avant-Garde Art Biennial (Primera Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia) in
Rosario, where they presented audio, photographic and documentary evidence of
the plight of Tucumán inhabitants” [105].
In the manifesto one can read: “The
exquisite and aestheticizing atmosphere of the false avant-garde experiences
produced at the institutions of official culture provided the backdrop for
these events, which gradually began to shape a new attitude that would
postulate the artistic endeavour as a positive and real action whose aspiration
should be to have a modifying effect on the milieu that engendered it. (…) The
acknowledgment of this new understanding led a group of artists to formulate
aesthetic creation as an active and collective action, thus destroying the bourgeois myth of the artist’s individuality as
well as the presumably passive nature of the artwork. Hence, deliberate
aggression became the form of the new art” [106]. As to the initiative “Tucumán burns”, it was about creating
what the signatories called, with a neologism, a “overinformational circuit” [107], to deny the value of information spread on
official media.
The Useful Art Manifesto by Eduardo Costa (1969) [108]
Another of the signatories of the manifesto of the Art of the Mass Media of 1966, or
Eduardo Costa, launched in 1969 an appeal from New York, where he lived between
1966 and 1971 to escape the military government, and called for an art pursuing
goals of immediate usefulness. Costa operated within the Street Works performances, organized by the Architectural League of New York. The manifesto explains that Costa,
at its own expense, bought and replaced a series of badly-worn road signs and
whitewashed a subway station. “These art
works were intended to attack the myth of the lack of utility of the arts,
while being in themselves a modest contribution to the improvement of city
living conditions” [109].
The Vertebra Group Manifesto (1970) [110]
With the Vértebra (Vertebra)
Group we move to Guatemala, where the
three painters Roberto Cabrera (1939-2014), Marco Augusto Quiroa (1937-2004)
and Elmar René Rojas (1942-2018 published a text on art entitled "Vertebra Manifesto" in the monthly
magazine Alero, in an almost full
atmosphere of civil war. This was undoubtedly a militant manifesto against the
military dictatorship. While the three authors defined the manifesto as “deeply embedded in the century of military
hells and of the atomic pandemic” [111], I would personally consider that
the text also revealed an intense poetry. As Jessica Lack wrote, “the group’s title alluded to their desire to
create an aesthetic spine running through the countries of Central America,
culturally uniting the artists of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras e
Costa Rica. [Signatories] promoted collage and a technique called ‘matter painting’, in which paint was
mixed with sand, shells and mud to create texture” [112]. Thus, if from an
iconographic point of view Vértebra artists remained – as we will see – in the
field of figurative art, from the angle of techniques it seems obvious to me that
they instead produced sort of a Central American version of the matter painting
tendencies in informal art, already present in the Hispanic world (as in the rest
of Europe) since the late forties.
The three authors claimed to recognize themselves in a new humanism,
and to find inspiration both in “the
agitated and terrible transcendentalism of the gothic world” [113] as well
as “in the labyrinth of contemporary
torment” [114]. What derived from it was twofold: “an alchemy of cathartic evolution” and “a mystical evocation of our
inner lives, unveiling the intensity of an age and an environment. What we are,
where we are, we go” [115].
The manifesto opposed any abstract art. It must be recalled that like
in Central America, in many other regions of the world the battle between
abstractionists and figurative coincided in those years with the ideological
opposition between the advocates of the US pattern and those who preached
alternative models. “Our art aspires to
rise above all the conformist game-playing and the siren calls of global
artistic purism. Above the falsified abstracting expansion as much as it is above
crass traditionalism. We place ourselves on the path of our genetic make-up,
faithful to an expression that connects it to the setting. Our humanly rooted
language springs from the reality that surrounds us. We are unconcerned – with
good reason – by the death rattle of the mechanical and egotistical art
repeated in New York or London. We acknowledge and value the intrinsic quality
of its roots, but we are interested in the flipside: the face that reveals the
integrity of man” [116].
The MUD / MEAT SEWER Manifesto (1970) [117]
The Portuguese Artur Barrio (1945-) was raised as an artist in
Brazil in the years of military dictatorship, but then came back to Europe
after the 1974 Carnation Revolution that
brought Portugal back to democracy. With his text, we come across another
expression of artistic radicalism of Latin America, which sought to shake
public opinion from torpor with striking actions. Jessica Lack wrote: “Barrio advocated anti-art as a survival
strategy, performing actions and situations in the street, rather than
exhibiting in a gallery, in order to circumvent strict governmental controls”
[118]. Its aesthetics was based on spreading decomposing materials, obviously
considered repellent, in the sidewalks of the streets of Brazilian cities, and
then photographing the shocked reaction of passers-by.
“What I look for is contact
with reality in its totality, everything that is rejected, everything that is
set aside because of its contentious character. A contesting which encloses a
radical reality, because this reality exists, despite being dissimulated
through symbols” [119]. Barrio described his physical output (the waste of
perishable materials) as not belonging to art, but to reality. He renounced to
be considered as an artist, but instead attributed that role to passers-by, who
by their horrified reaction became true creators.
The Manifesto of the Antillean Group (1978) [120]
The Antillean Group was created in Cuba by the sculptor Rafael
Queneditt Morales (1942-2016) and brought together around fifteen black Cuban
artists, writers and musicians who intended to recover their African origins
and at the same time express their solidarity with the other artists of the
Antilles. They therefore recovered the contents of the black art manifestos in
the Caribbean, already issued in the thirties, and linked themselves at the
same time to the Pan-African concepts of art present in the seventies. Jessica
Lack wrote: “The works created by the
group’s members possessed no single distinct, defining style. Instead, they
displayed a wide variety of African aesthetic influences, from folk art to
religious symbolism, and were characterized by a strong underlying desire to
represent the whole of Antillean culture, not just its Hispanic heritage”
[121]
The manifesto reads: “Art and
literature are the most refined and profound representations of the social
conditions and developments of people. Through such manifestations cultural
groups project their personality fully and reaffirm their nationality.
Imperialism understands this phenomenon, which accounts for its incessant
efforts to culturally penetrate other people, with the ultimate goal of
depersonalization and denationalization” [122]. The Cuban revolution – the manifesto
continued - instead created the conditions to free the artists and make them
aware of their ethnic origins. These statements, in reality, were in contrast
with the official position of the regime, which condemned any ethnic-African
reference as primitive and counter-revolutionary, not being interested in recognising
separate identities within the Cuban people, which was instead exalted as whole
united in support of Fidel Castro’s politics.
For the group, the African origin was instead the focus of identity
and art production. “Today … we see a
growing number of Cuban painters and sculptors who are motivated simply by
their profound condition as Cubans and an awareness of their ethnic origins who
consciously or unconsciously are taking the only path possible toward a common
identity” [123]. In her introduction to the document, Jessica Lack wrote
that the group's echo in Cuba remained limited, leading to its dissolution in
1983. Even Cuban dissident art (the so-called "new Cuban art")
manifested itself since the eighties as an attempt to open up towards the art
of the West, thus leaving the Antillean
Group isolated, as the only manifestation of an ethnic feeling. The Antillean Group has only recently been
rediscovered in a series of traveling exhibitions across Cuba and the United
States between 2013 and 2016 (http://www.queloides-exhibit.com/grupo-antillano/).
Colectivo de Acciones de Arte – Statement by the CADA group (1982)
[124]
CADA means Colectivo de
Acciones de Arte (Collective of Art Action). It encompassed five dissident
artists living in Pinochet's Chile, challenging military repression with
performance and direct action: Fernando Balcells (1950-), Juan Castillo
(1952-), Diamela Eltit ( 1947-), Lotty Rosenfeld (1943-) and Raúl Zurita
(1950-). CADA was created in 1979, two years after the 1977 coup; their
manifesto was published in 1982 by the magazine Ruptura; their No+ action
was repeated continuously between 1983 and 1984. Jessica Lack wrote: “The group clandestinely covered the walls of
Santiago with the sign ‘NO+’, tacitly inviting the public to voice their
protests by complementing the phrase: ‘NO+Murders’, ‘NO+Torture’, ‘NO+Guns’ and
so on. The work’s impact made ‘No mas’
[No more] a potent anti-Pinochet
slogan which continued to be used until the collapse of the dictator’s regime
in 1990” [125]. Of the five members, the most famous is today Lotty
Rosenfeld, represented at the Frankfurt exhibition with the documentation on her
actions in Santiago, where she intervened on road signs as a form of
provocation that intended to force passers-by to reflect critically on reality.
While Rosenfeld and Castillo were two artists, the other members were
a sociologist (Balcells), a poet (Zurita) and a writer (Eltit). The text was
thus written in an abstract language, but raised a series of aesthetic
problems, proclaiming that the inadequacy of Latin American art had become “a matter of life or death” [126].
Firstly, the CADA group wondered how the “concept
of creativity” [127] could and had to be affirmed “in a context such as ours” [128] (the artists did not hesitate to
talk about “dependency, imperialism,
authoritarian regimes” [129]), requiring “specificity in reference to artistic products” [130]. Then the signatories
dwelled on the problem of Latin American cultural delay: “Historically marginalized from international art movements and their
financial and distribution networks, any form of expression born in these
regions, even if it refers to the same international terminology and takes
shelter under the same ideas of art defined by the international hubs of
culture, raises questions about its own nature, about its methods and about its
objectives. The answers to these questions go beyond the field of semiological
axiomatics, raising instead the issue of its overall relationship to the
struggles and the developments in our socialized reality” [131].
One of the fundamental concepts of the manifesto was that while “this very concept of art … in developed
capitalist countries, allows us to distinguish between activities such as
politics, science, art or religion, and thus to define specific objectives,
individual strategies” [132], this was not possible in Chile (after all,
every group of revolutionary art always lived in the romantic myth of total
art, made necessary by the extraordinary nature of the conditions of its time).
Furthermore, marginality with respect to international art could become a
condition of freedom: “To work in that
marginal space implies a degree of belonging that is not necessarily fixed and
that, instead, establishes itself as a field of battle, as an arena of
confrontation in which the concepts of art and life complement and tear each
other apart” [133]. Only those who were exposed - even physically - to a life
or death risk could in fact conceive total art differently from what Duchamp
did, wrongly identifying every object of daily use as art.
On the other hand, the experiences of the Chilean situation were
best fitting with “body art, landscape
art, or performance art” [134]. Indeed, these manifestations had been
relevant in Latin America even before they were defined as artistic expressions
in the West, “because of the degree of
daily familiarity with these living forms: hungry bodies, vast infertile
plains, fallow fields” [135]. Therefore, what in the West had developed as
an extemporaneous art, in Chile was instead part of the experience of life: “the precarious and painful, as well as (…)
the barrenness of concrete lives” [136]. CADA therefore set itself the goal
not only of “to shift the limits of our reality”
[137], but “also to criticize and revise
from a global perspective what the avant-garde signifies” [138].
The result was a critique of the self-referential nature of art.
Every action must be about “establishing
a practise that operates within the parameters of our own history” [139]
and therefore should be a political act [140]. At the same time, performance had
a deeper meaning than a simple event. On the one hand, in fact, action was an
existential moment: as an actor of artistic actions, the artist “operates as both a summation and
sublimation, the black and white of collective circuits. The artistic creator
is both scenery and scene; the hunger to reproduce reality is identical to the
hunger for food, or at least they share the same nature. The creator’s body is,
in the final instance, a black hole in which all the misgivings about meaning
converge and where theory and practice become synonymous. It is that bipolarity
of creation and creator that precedes the formalization of artistic currents”
[141]. On the other hand, action was a moment of vindication for a better
future: “Similarly, the expectation,
whether catastrophic or hopeful, of a change in the totality of social
relations, mirrors its own material base, and becomes a characteristic trait of
the way in which our history operates. Constantly subjected to the comings and
goings of history (from right-wing dictatorships to socialists experiences),
that expectation reinforces the historical nature underpinning creative
practices; the stage is not only the present, but also a certain dimension of
the future, that manifests itself both in faith (in the Christian sense of the
word) and in political positions – a permanently denied, altered, remade
future, whose effects are visible in the challenging of the past (in socialist
agendas) and the quest for traces of that past in models of the future (typical
of authoritarian governments); in any case it affirms an understanding torn
from the present. It is precisely the bringing back to the present of future
possibilities that defines the most consequential artistic practices. Therein
lies the model of action. That model is action art” [142].
Manifesto of the 3rd February Front [143]
The group 3rd February
(2004) operated in Brazil to protest against police racism. Multidisciplinary
artists set it up to protest against many tragic episodes which saw police
repeatedly killing young black Brazilians in manifestly unjustified situations.
The artists moved to action after the murdering of a university student on 3
February 2004 during what was supposed to be a simple check of identity
documents. The prototype of the members of the group was the performance art of
the aforementioned Artur Barrio, the artist distributing disgusting materials
in the streets of Brazilian cities. However, 3rd February Front members changed
the object of artistic creation. In 2007 the group produced, among other
things, a video, a record and a book, all titled Zumbi Somos Nos:
Cartografía del Racismo para la Juventud Urbana (We are Zumbi: Mapping
of Racism among Urban Youth). The title was inspired by the vicissitudes of
Zumbi dos Palmares (1655-1695), a guerrilla who led the resistance of black
slaves within an independent – and territorially very large - political
community in Brazil, for many decades managing to escape the Portuguese control.
The Manifesto of Migrants (2011) [145]
We have already spoken about the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (1968-)
in the first part of this post about her 2012 Manifesto
for the Rights of Artists, read at the UN to protest against repression and
censorship. Here instead we want to refer to the manifesto of the International Movement of Migrants,
which she promoted in 2011 together with the Queens Museum of New York, where
she was a resident artist (thus also living - albeit in a privileged way - the
reality of migration from a Latin country American in the United States). With
Bruguera, who had often been subjected in Cuba to measures restricting freedom
for her irreverent actions towards power, the cause of internal dissent against
the Castro regime was therefore combined with the universal reasons for human
rights, in a world where the movement of people was seen as a factor that made
“international connectivity” [146]
possible within the whole humanity. Immigration, the manifesto wrote, also
assures that populations who received migrants can better organise proximity services
(like for instance through caregivers), thereby improving their quality of
life. From an artistic point of view, the public reading of the manifesto (in
the first part we saw a photo of an action in New York, below we are showing the
International Week of Performance Art
in Venice in 2014) became the artistic fact itself.
NOTES
[80] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2017, 501 pages. Quotation at pp. 38-41.
[81] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 38.
[82] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 39.
[83] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 39-40.
[84] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 40.
[85] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 40.
[86] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 40.
[87] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 40.
[88] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 54.
[89] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 54.
[90] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 54.
[91] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 55.
[92] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 55.
[93] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 64-65.
[94] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 64-65.
[95] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 78-80.
[96] Corriere d’Informazione, Live rats on [President] Segni’s feet while visiting the Biennale, Saturday-Sunday, June 16-17, 1962.
[97] See: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristo_%2763#cite_note-ReferenceA-6.
[98] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 78-79.
[99] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 79.
[100] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 99-101.
[101] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 99.
[102] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 100.
[103] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 101.
[104] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 113-118.
[105] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 113.
[106] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 114.
[107] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 116.
[108] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 119-120.
[109] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 120.
[110] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 150-153.
[111] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 151.
[112] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 150.
[113] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 151.
[114] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 151.
[115] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 151.
[116] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 152.
[117] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 154-155.
[118] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 154.
[119] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 154.
[120] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 320-323.
[121] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 320.
[122] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 321.
[123] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 322.
[124] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 343-351.
[125] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 343.
[126] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[127] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[128] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[129] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[130] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[131] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[132] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 344.
[133] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 345.
[134] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 345.
[135] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 345.
[136] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 345.
[137] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 345.
[138] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 345.
[139] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 346.
[140] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 346.
[141] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 346.
[142] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 346-347.
[143] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 435-435.
[144] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 435.
[145] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, pp. 458-460.
[146] Lack, Jessica - Why Are We 'Artists'? (quoted) …, p. 459.
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