M31 Arte de los Medios de Comunicación Masivos
A Mass-Mediatic Art (1966)
The group Arte de los Medios de Comunicación Masivos (Mass-Mediatic Art) was formed in Argentina in 1966 by the conceptual artists Eduardo Costa (b. 1940), Roberto Jacoby (b. 1944) and Raúl Escari (b. 1944). Their aim was to use the mass media as both the medium and the subject of an artwork, and they set out their plans to do so in their eponymous manifesto written in Buenos Aires in July 1966 and first published in Happenings (1967), a collection of writings on Argentinian conceptual and performance art compiled by the theorist Oscar Masotta.
As outlined in the manifesto, 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. The artists’ position was based on the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s theory that ‘the medium is the message’ – in other words, that meaning varies depending on the characteristics and proclivities of the medium through which it is communicated. On those grounds, they argued, because their piece was entirely reliant on a mediator (in this case the press) for whatever existence it possessed, it was in fact an ‘anti-happening’. As well as its debt to McLuhan, the manifesto also cites the American multimedia artist Nam June Paik, who was one of the pioneers of television as an artistic medium.
The group’s tactics were used again in 1968, when Jacoby, as part of the Vanguard Artists’ Group, helped hoodwink the Argentinian media into exposing to the wider world the appalling living and working conditions of the inhabitants of Tucumán province (M35).
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In a civilization dominated by the mass media, 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. ‘To distribute two thousand copies of a work, in a big modern city, is the same as shooting into the air and waiting for the pigeons to fall from the sky,’ Nam June Paik once said. The truth is that the consumers of information do not care if an exhibition is carried out or not; the only thing that matters is the image of the artistic event rebuilt by the mass media.
Today’s art (especially Pop Art) occasionally brings into play elements and techniques taken from the media, isolating them from their natural context (Lichtenstein or D’Arcangelo’s route charts, for instance). Unlike Pop Art, we intend to concoct a work ‘inside’ those media. We intend to give the press a written report, illustrated with photographs, about a happening that has never occurred. This false report will include the names of the participants and an indication of the time and place where the would-be happening was carried out, along with a description of the alleged spectacle and photographs of the alleged participants taken in different circumstances. Thus, from the mode of transmitting the information – from the mode of ‘carrying out’ the nonexistent event – and from the divergences between the different versions presented by the various broadcasters, the meaning of the work will emerge: it is a work whose existence begins the moment the viewer’s conscience realizes that it has already ended.
Therefore, this is a threefold creation:
– the writing of the false report;
– the broadcasting of the report through the information channels:fn1
– its reception by the viewer, who – on the basis of the transmitted data and according to the meaning these acquire – bestows consistency on a nonexistent reality considered as factual.
We thus take a characteristic of the mass media to its ultimate consequences: divesting the object of reality. In this way, we privilege the moment of the work’s transmission over that of its constitution. Creation here consists in handing over the work’s constitution to its transmission.
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.
From the viewer’s perspective, there are two possible readings for this kind of work. On the one hand, that of the viewer who trusts the media and believes what he sees; on the other, that of the viewer in the know, previously warned about the nonexistence of a work whose news is being broadcast.
In this way the possibility of a new genre emerges, a Mass-Mediatic art, in which what really matters is not ‘what is said’ but the media itself as media, as subject matter.
Furthermore, the report prepares the addressees for the second reading by warning some of them and thus creating the first step of the works we announced.
Buenos Aires, July 1966