M10 Arte Madí

Madí Manifesto (1947)

Arte Madí was an Argentinian group of Constructivist artists founded in Buenos Aires in 1944 by the charismatic sculptor and poet Gyula Košice (1924–2016), Rhod Rothfuss (1920–69) and Carmelo Arden Quin (1913–2010), who shortly after quit the group. The name is thought to be an acronym for ‘Movimiento, Abstracción, Dimensión, Invención’ (Movement, Abstraction, Dimension, Invention). These young experimental artists promoted a playful art that embraced instability, innovation and exploration. They worked with water and light to make hydrokinetic sculptures, painted on irregular shaped canvases, using plexiglass and other industrial materials, and published the journal Arte Madí Universal, which promoted their energetic vision of an art that was not only classless but also boundless in time and space. ‘MADÍ destroys the TABOO OF PAINTING by breaking with the traditional frame,’ wrote Košice. They considered abstract art to be the art of the people – the aesthetic expression of a new utopian society along the lines of communism. They were anti-fascist and denounced the nationalist government of President Juan Domingo Perón.

It has been disputed as to who wrote Arte Madí’s manifesto, although Košice seems to have drafted the most essential points. It was published in their journal in 1947 and called for an inventive, experimental art that blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture.

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Madí art can be identified by the organisation of elements peculiar to each art in its continuum. It contains presence, movable dynamic arrangement, development of the theme itself, lucidity and plurality as absolute values, and is, therefore, free from interference by the phenomena of expression, representation and meaning.

Madí drawing is an arrangement of dots and lines on a surface.

Madí painting, colour and two-dimensionality. Uneven and irregular frame, flat surface, and curved or concave surface. Articulated surfaces with lineal, rotating and changing movement.

Madí sculpture, three-dimensional, no colour. Total form and solid shapes with contour, articulated, rotating, changing movement, etc.

Madí architecture, environment and mobile movable forms.

Madí music, recording of sounds in the golden section.

Madí poetry, invented proposition, concepts and images which are untranslatable by means other than language. Pure conceptual happening.

Madí theatre, movable scenery, invented dialogue.

Madí novel and short story, characters and events outside specific time and space, or in totally invented time and space.

Madí dance, body and movements circumscribed within a restricted space, without music.

In highly industrialised countries, the old bourgeois realism has almost completely disappeared, naturalism is being defended very half-heartedly and is beating a retreat.

It is at this point that abstraction, essentially expressive and romantic, takes its place. Figurative schools of art, from Cubism to Surrealism, are caught up in this order. Those schools responded to the ideological needs of the time and their achievements are invaluable contributions to the solution of problems of contemporary culture. Nevertheless, their historic moment is past. Their insistence on ‘exterior’ themes is a return to naturalism, rather than to the true constructivist spirit which has spread through all countries and cultures, and is seen for example in Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism, etc.

With Concrete Art – which in fact is a younger branch of that same abstract spirit – began the great period of non-figurative art, in which the artist, using the element and its respective continuum, creates the work in all its purity, without hybridisation and objects without essence. But Concrete Art lacked universality and organisation. It developed deep irreconcilable contradictions. The great voids and taboos of ‘old’ art were preserved, in painting, sculpture, poetry respectively, superimposition, rectangular frame, lack of visual theme, the static interaction between volume and environment, nosological and graphically translatable propositions and images. The result was that, with an organic theory and disciplinarian practice, Concrete Art could not seriously combat the intuitive movements, like Surrealism, which have won over the universe. And so, despite adverse conditions, came the triumph of instinctive impulses over reflection, intuition over consciousness; the revelation of the unconscious over cold analysis, the artist’s thorough and rigorous study vis-à-vis the laws of the object to be constructed; the symbolic, the hermetic, and the magic over reality; the metaphysical over experience.

Evident in the theory and knowledge of an art is subjective, idealist, and reactionary description.

To sum up, pre-Madí art:

A scholastic, idealist historicism

An irrational concept

An academic technique

A false, static and unilateral composition

A work lacking in essential utility

A consciousness paralysed by insoluble contradictions; impervious to the permanent renovation in technique and style

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. Without basic descriptions of its total organisation, it is impossible to construct the object or bring it into the continuity of creation. So the concept of invention is defined in the field of technique and the concept of creation as a totally defined essence.

For Madí-ism, invention is an internal, superable ‘method’, and creation is an unchangeable totality. Madí, therefore, INVENTS AND CREATES.