M35 The Vanguard Artists’ Group
Tucumán Arde Manifesto (1968)
In 1968 a group of left-wing Argentinian artists and activists calling themselves the Vanguard Artists’ Group (Artistas de vanguardia) decided to use their art and the mass media as tools in what they hoped would be a revolutionary struggle against the country’s military dictatorship. Rejecting the dilettante avant-garde of the Di Tella Institute, which had been set up in 1958 to further Argentinian culture and science, the group’s intention was to create art that was actively involved in society rather than simply a passive observer. One of the members, Roberto Jacoby (b. 1944), had been part of the provocative conceptual art group Arte de los Medios de Comunicación Masivos, which had duped the mass media into reporting a fictionalized happening two years before (M31).
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). They then announced to the press the staging of the First Avant-Garde Art Bienniale (Primera Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia) in Rosario, where they presented audio, photographic and documentary evidence of the plight of Tucumán’s inhabitants. The group distributed its manifesto in and around the city during the exhibition, before it moved to Buenos Aires, where the government swiftly closed it down. Today, the ‘Tucumán Arde’ manifesto and exhibition are regarded as pivotal to the emergence of a highly politicized artistic milieu in Argentina.
From 1968 on, the Argentinean visual arts scene was shaken by a series of aesthetic events whose expressed goal was to break with the supposedly avant-garde stance advocated by the artists of the Di Tella Institute. Up to that moment, the institute had assigned itself the right to legislate artistic activities and to propose new models for action, not only for its own artists, but also for all new aesthetic experiences in the country.
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 endeavor as a positive and real action whose aspiration should be to have a modifying effect on the milieu that engendered it.
Accordingly, the political content implicit in every work of art was to be made explicit as an active and violent charge. Only in this way might artists embrace reality with a truly avant-garde, and thus revolutionary, spirit. Aesthetic events that denounced the horror of the Vietnam War, as well as the cynical falseness of the United States policy, signaled the need to create effectively. The goal was not to produce a reaction to the milieu, but to transform it as efficiently as did political events.
The acknowledgment of this new understanding led a group of artists to formulate aesthetic creation as a violent 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. To exert violence is to possess and destroy the old forms of an art built on the private ownership and personal enjoyment of the unique work of art. Violence then becomes an action that creates new contents; it destroys the official culture’s subsystem, countering it with a subversive culture that launches the process of transformation by producing a truly revolutionary art.
Revolutionary art is born of a consciousness on the part of the artist of belonging to the political and social complex that encompasses him or her.
Revolutionary art considers the aesthetic act as the core where all the elements that constitute human reality: economic, social, and political, come together. It acts as an integrating factor of the contributions from the diverse fields of social endeavors, thus eliminating the separation of artists, intellectuals, and technicians. It is, therefore, a unifying action directed toward the transformation of the whole social structure – it is total art.
Armed with a lucid ideological conception based on the principles of materialist rationalism, revolutionary art operates in the social context through a process that grasps the fundamental elements that constitute reality.
In this way, revolutionary art presents itself as a partial form of reality integrated into the whole, thus nullifying the idealist separation between the world and the work of art. Insofar as it accomplishes a real transformation of the social structures, it is transforming art.
Joining with the revolutionary forces that fight against economic dependency and class oppression, revolutionary art is the disclosure of the political forces that struggle against the obsolete cultural and aesthetic schemes of bourgeois society. It is, therefore, social art.
The work carried out by the Artistas de vanguardia is the continuation of a series of acts of aggression against institutions and representatives of bourgeois culture. An example of this was the refusal to participate in and the boycott of the Braque Award organized by the Attaché Culturel of the French Embassy in Argentina; the action resulted in the imprisonment of some artists who tried to express their refusal violently.
The collective work executed by these artists is based on the current Argentinean political and social situation. In one of the country’s poorest provinces, Tucumán, which has been subjected for a long time to economic oppression and underdevelopment, it grew significantly more radical. The Argentinean government, which at the time had adopted a harmful colonizing policy, had closed down almost all sugar mills in Tucumán. As these were vital to the economy of the province, widespread unemployment and hunger ensued, along with other negative social consequences. A program called Operativo Tucumán, set up by government economists, tried to cover up this open aggression against the working class by announcing an alleged economic development in the region based on the creation of new but still-hypothetical industries financed with United States capital. The government’s actual objective was the destruction of the genuine and explosive labor union that had spread in the northeast. As a result of this policy, unions were dissolved and workers re-grouped in small atomized industrial enterprises, or they were forced to emigrate to other regions to find temporary jobs that offered low pay and no stability. One of the most serious consequences of such a policy was the breakup of the working-class family, whose subsistence now depended solely on improvisation and chance. The economic policies carried out by the government in the province of Tucumán constitute a sort of test or pilot experiment that aims to measure the degree of worker resistance, to seek the subsequent neutralization of union opposition, and to control its spread to other provinces with similar social and economic characteristics.
Operativo Tucumán has been strengthened further by Operativo silencio, sponsored by governmental organizations in an attempt to conceal, distort, and suppress information on the serious economic situation in Tucumán. Motivated by shared class interests, the so-called free press has joined the fight on the side of the government.
In order to fulfil their responsibility as intellectuals engaged with their surrounding social reality, the avant-garde artists responded to this Operativo silencio by executing ‘TUCUMÁN ARDE’.
The work consists of the creation of an overinformational circuit that aims at denouncing the deceitful distortion of the events in Tucumán by a media dominated by state officials and the bourgeoisie. The various mass media are a powerful force of communication and mediation that lends itself to very diverse appreciations of the events: the positive influence they have on society depends on the veracity and truthfulness of this subject matter. Governmental information about the situation in Tucumán represents an attempt to deny the seriousness of the social problems caused by the closing down of the sugar mills. By evoking a false image of economic recovery in the region, this misinformation blatantly contradicts the real facts.
To gather these facts and denounce the mendacity of the government, as well as the bad faith of the class that supports it, the group of avant-garde artists, along with technicians and specialists, travelled to Tucumán to verify the real social situation in the province. Their effort culminated in a press conference in which they made public in a violent way their repudiation of the government’s actions and denounced the complicity of media in the maintenance of the degrading and shameful social conditions under which the working class of Tucumán found itself. Groups of students and workers collaborated with the artists in the promotion of the work throughout unionist organizations.
The group of artists went to Tucumán armed with documents on the province’s real social and economic situation, as well as with a detailed study of the media information on these topics that carefully analyzes its degree of distortion and falsification of data. The next step consisted of organizing the information gathered by the artists and technicians to be presented at the Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos [General Confederation of Labour of the Argentines]. Subsequently, the information prepared by the media on the artists’ actions in Tucumán was added to the informational circuit in its first phase.
The second part of the work comprises the presentation of all the information on the situation and the artists in Tucumán to be aired in union assembly rooms, student centers, and cultural organizations, including the audio-visual performance at the CGT de los Argentinos in both its Buenos Aires and Rosario chapters.
The main objectives of the overinformational circuit is to carry out a process against reification that redresses the image of Tucumán’s reality produced by the media. This process will culminate in a third and final phase as it creates a third degree of information. All information will be gathered and formalized in a publication that will also offer a report on the work’s conception and creation processes, along with the corresponding documentation and a final assessment.
The position adopted by the avant-garde artists prevented them from showing their work in the cultural institutions of the bourgeoisie. Thus, this show was presented at the CGT de los Argentinos, the organization that represents the class situated at the avant-garde of a struggle whose objectives are shared by the authors of this work.
María Teresa Gramuglio
Nicolás Rosa
Participants in this work:
Ma. Elvira de Arechavala, Beatríz Balbé, Graciela Borthwick, Aldo Bortolotti, Graciela Carnevale, Jorge Cohen, Rodolfo Elizalde, Noemí Escandell, Eduardo Favario, León Ferrari, Emilio Ghilioni, Edmundo Giura, Ma. Teresa Gramuglio, Martha Greiner, Roberto Jacoby, José Ma. Lavarello, Sara López Dupuy, Rubén Naranjo, David de Nully Braun, Raúl Perez Cantón, Oscar Pidustwa, Estella Pomerantz, Norberto Púzzolo, Juan Pablo Renzi, Jaime Rippa, Nicolás Rosa, Carlos Schork, Nora de Schork, Domingo J. A. Sapia, Roberto Zara.
Córdoba 2061 – 3–9 Nov. 1968