When silence talks

We shared this text on the occasion of ‘Again for Tomorrow’, in an attempt to bring over a process undergone by the history of Argentine art, which informs both the creation of the ‘Grupo Arte de Vanguardia’ Archive and the foundation of Trama.
Graciela Carnevale published this article in Argentina during the 90s, in an extremely neo-liberal context that enveloped the political and the cultural spheres. It was at this time that artist Carnevale resumed her practice after years of silence. Artistic practice and production were then heavily conditioned by a notion inherited from the 80s: the artist was seen as a supplier of commodities and was expected to be coherent with an image/product –a trademark- that endowed his/her artistic practice with credibility. The platforms of exhibition where artistic production circulated (museums, commercial art galleries, and official cultural centres) showed little or no interest in the idea of art as a means to build up bonds within the community, while the Argentine political and cultural history of the 60s and 70s was generally displayed as the failure of utopia, a miscalculation that had to be hushed up. As a response to the context described above, Trama was established in 2000, striving to open up a space for discussion and legitimisation of thought in the field of art, while recapturing the processual elements involved in the creation of the work of art.
Trama, March 2006

Having lived through the 60s, it is no easy task to reflect, from the perspective of the 90s, on the connection between poetics and politics in the 60s. Still, I will attempt to do so from my personal experience in the field of art. However hard I strive to rid my vision from partiality and subjectivity, I am afraid that I will not be able to speak from an objective standpoint, but this particular standpoint may well help to contextualise the facts. To me, talking about the 60s amounts to talking about the notion of group. The kind of group I envisage was composed by people coming from two different backgrounds: Grela’s Workshop and the School of Fine Arts. At the initial stages, the works they proposed encouraged rupture with a sector that kept the younger generations away, blocking every possibility of innovative expression. Far from questioning the very essence of the art institution, this group fights to defend its right to a place in the art field. These conflicts are clearly depicted in manifestos such as “A propósito de la cultura mermelada” [On the Marmalade Culture] and “Cómo nuevamente se pretende dar oxígeno a una pintura que hace tiempo ha muerto” [New attempts at pumping oxygen into a style of painting that has long been dead].
Finding ourselves unable to show our work and express our ideas in the places designed for this purpose, we sought for alternative spaces. Our works were removed from their usual context to be exhibited in the streets, at the entrance to cinemas, and in shopping arcades. Thus, they reached a different kind of public.
This is how we began to generate a movement that gathered all those who wished to become members of the art field through new aesthetic principles, while entertaining the utopia of living off their artistic production.
At first, these ways were deemed “picturesque” or “capricious”, and were subjected to criticism by the media. As time passed, the artists’ new courses of action grew more and more aggressive.
The problems involved in art became the core of all discussions. New languages were researched, new materials were introduced, and new supports were sought. Forms that had so far been accepted were brought into question, and the function of art was interrogated.
The resulting changes were indeed frantic. Each new work altered previously posited notions. Expressionism, minimalism, the object, installations, and conceptual art were all subjects of experiment. In a very short time, the formal problems posed by the avant –gardes were broached and questioned, and artists adopted an anti-establishment, ready-to-fight attitude that unmistakably showed the conflicting interests in both the art and the social fields.
The national and international socio-political context of the times, added to the actual conditions of artists’ practices in the field of art slowly began to give rise to a critical conscience, which, in turn, contributed to the radicalisation of thought and to a deeper commitment with social reality.
The appealing changes undergone by the said reality demanded concrete participation and commitment. This exacerbated polarisation, and it was crucial to take sides.
It became imperative to read. Philosophy and other disciplines were the sources where to look for theorists whose work might support the new ideas. Thus we read Althusser, Barthes, Marcuse, Sartre, Brecht, Piscator, Eco, Marx, Lenin, Mac Luhan: an eclectic set of notions where we sought for answers to an endless number of queries. The artist’s need to become intellectually committed aroused tension between artistic and political practice.
Early in 1968, the group had achieved cohesion and adopted an openly resistive position. The need to communicate new contents and to leave the institutions and the sancta sanctorum of the elites caused the works to turn more controversial, more direct; this new production absorbed the political, stirred action and participation, and called for audience’s physical involvement.
Risk and violence were incorporated as aesthetic materials. In order to mobilise, denounce, and agitate, the new proposals cast aside the values upheld by official art. Several actions, like Ciclo Arte Experimental [Series of Experimental Art], the boycott to the Braque Award, and the action that spoiled Romero Brest’s lecture at Amigos del Arte, in which the subsidy granted by the Di Tella Institute was formally rejected, were carefully organised and carried out. The papers submitted at Primer Encuentro de Arte de Vanguardia [First Encounter of Avant-garde Art], first held in Rosario to be continued in Buenos Aires, together with later discussions on these issues, laid the foundations for a new aesthetics.
The streets turned into a field of action: artists took part in demonstrations and joined the proposals issued by the most progressist political groups, which abandoned the cultural apparatus, renounced art galleries and awards, and contacted workers’ organisations.
“Tucumán arde” emerged as the climax of this process, making use of one of the claims for which the CGT de los Argentinos [General Confederation of Argentine Workers] was struggling in order to create a collective work denouncing the anguishing situation of workers in Tucumán as a consequence of the sugar mills shutdown.
This work was contrived by groups from Rosario and Buenos Aires, and included not only visual artists but also intellectuals from various cultural fields.
“Tucumán arde” intended to start a counter-information circuit with the purpose of bringing to the public eye the real state of affairs that the administration was concealing from the people. It was planned as an action divided into several stages. While a part of the group travelled to Tucumán to gather information about the facts being concealed, another part, stationed in Rosario, took care of ancillary tasks and set in motion an anonymous publicity campaign in anticipation of the right moment for action.
In early November 1968, the exhibition-cum-denunciation opened in Rosario’s CGTA headquarters under the name of “Primera Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia” [First Avant-garde Art Biennial]. It ended up as a political act with massive attendance.
The work was set up using huge, blown up mural photographs, writings, statistics, recordings, charts, etc. All of the material was then taken to the Buenos Aires CGTA, where the layout was adapted to the building. Two days later, the Governing Board, unable to resist the pressure exercised by the National Government, banned the exhibition.
What did “Tucumán Arde” actually stand for? Why is it still regarded as a paradigmatic icon of the 60s?
Basically, it emphasised rupture. It was a work of art outside the institutional circuit of art; a work that refused to be either constrained or “tamed”.
It was meant to question art as well as the establishment. It showed a group of artists who, having become aware of the conditions under which they had been working, implemented a proposal to operate a change. Their new awareness led to questioning the role of the artist in society, the institutional spaces reserved to art, the purpose of a work of art, its form and content. It also led to consider some sort of correspondence between art and life that could help revisit the practice of art from a position of ethical conscience.
Reality did not leave room for hesitation; the facts demanded straightforward responses. It was essential to make a choice. The framework of action was shifting in a different direction. Militancy in art led to militancy in politics, and culture yielded its place to the social sphere as a field of action. Art blended with life; life turned into artwork. The edges along the gap between politics and art drew closer. The practice of art called for a new morality, for a new ethics. A praxis that brought out the transformation inherent to the New Man. The individual realised in the collective.
After the experience of “Tucumán arde”, the artists involved tried to continue working as a group. However, their ideological differences soon became apparent. To continue implied to go deeper into the newly opened path, but also to go deeper into the ruptures and to accept political commitment. All this amounted to going deeper into a risky field.
Attempts were made to implement various proposals and strategies, but the group was simply not ready to take a step forward and leave their differences behind. They were unable to find alternative paths within the boundaries of their marginality.
Rupture and splitting ensued. Art was abandoned. Silence mastered the scene. To some of these artists, silence and renunciation to art was definitive; to others it meant taking distance from it, for a shorter or a longer period of time. Those who decided to return had to rethink the goals they had originally pursued and recast their production in a totally different context. The ones who gave up art for the sake of political militancy fulfilled the postulates of their commitment with reality to the last consequences. The road chosen led some of them to death and others to exile.
In the years that followed, there were cases in which teaching acquired a new meaning, as an attempt to alter and resist –through a less blatant practice- a reality that became ever more stifling and alienating. The alienation experienced involved both the underlying ideology of the times and the oppressive feeling generated by the annihilation policy sustained by the most aggressive sectors of society.
When democracy was reinstated, it was possible to envisage that something could change, that not everything had been lost. For a short while, there was an illusion that one could be a protagonist and view oneself as an agent for change. Still, the mirage did not last long.
I returned to the University. Regaining contact with the students, I became aware that the principles and postulates of the 60s had been a response to a definite, particular historical process, but that present conditions are quite different and that, therefore, it is necessary to think of art and of the artist’s role in other ways. I acknowledged that we need to seek and find other strategies and other proposals. Here lies the challenge.
If we think that aesthetics and politics will always be related, though the connection between both varies in accordance with the ideologies and practices put into play at a given socio-political context, we can realise that, even if we still believe in the postulates that we developed in the 60s, we cannot hold on to practices of the past because the new reality demands new responses.
We cannot extrapolate certain practices into a particular, differential context. We cannot turn “Tucumán arde” in a model for duplication, but we can indeed turn it into a tool to aid reflection.
“Tucumán arde” was the response that a group of artists devised on the face of a particular historical moment. It was a response circumscribed to the existing conditions. The question to be posed today is which are the present conditions and which the possible responses; in other words, how to change the format without changing the purpose?
The challenge we are confronting lies in how to exercise negativity within a context where previous historical parameters have been replaced.
Which alternative paths do we allow ourselves to pick?
Which spaces or cracks can we take possession of? How and what can we produce?
Once again, I return to the field of art as a member of a heterogeneous group. It becomes imperative to start from a more intimate manner of thought, from a more personal reflection in an attempt to find my identity.
Today my utopia is rather unambitious. It lacks the heroic quality that marked the 60s.
I wonder whether resistance resides in a return to the self, to art as a manner of thought, a manner of reflection, where uncertainty becomes apparent and strives to emerge in isolated, partial answers that address fragments of the present reality and help to modify our perceptions. To talk about what is ours, to discover what we are like, who we are, where we are.
I wonder where we stand when we produce: do we produce from the parameters laid down by power or from the recovery of a space of our own, from individual proposals closely related to our history and experience?
Perhaps what we produce is not seen as militant, but as definitely political, insofar as we take politics to be our attitude to life and to other people. I believe this is a time for questioning. A time to accept the aesthetic experience as one of constant questioning.

Graciela Carnevale
May 1999
Translated by Marta Merajver