Why Are We ‘Artists’?: 100 World Art Manifestos

M73 Colectivo de Acciones de Arte

A Declaration by the CADA (1982)

The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (Collective for Art Actions), or CADA, was founded in Chile in the late 1970s by the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld (b. 1943) and Juan Castillo (b. 1952), the poet Raúl Zurita (b. 1950), the novelist Diamela Eltit (b. 1944) and the sociologist Fernando Balcells (b. 1950) with the aim of interrogating the relationship between art and politics under the brutal realities of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Some of the members had previously been involved in the communist group Brigada Ramona Parra, creating agit-prop murals during elections. CADA’s art took the form of public art actions and everyday happenings, using the Chilean capital Santiago as the foundation on which their interventions were performed.

In August 1982 they published their manifesto, ‘Una ponencia del CADA’ (‘A Declaration by the CADA’), in the journal Ruptura: Documento de arte, which discusses how widespread social resistance to Pinochet’s regime could be achieved through cultural interventions, referring to the French left-wing philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his writings on art, politics and perception. Their ideas were perhaps most clearly illustrated in their final work, the direct action No + (No más, or No More) (1983–4). The group clandestinely covered the walls of Santiago with the sign ‘No +’, tacitly inviting the public to voice their protests by completing the phrase: ‘No + Murders’, ‘No + Torture’, ‘No + Guns’, and so on. The work’s impact made ‘No más’ a potent anti-Pinochet slogan which continued to be used until the collapse of the dictator’s regime in 1990.

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To reaffirm dialectically the concept of creativity in a context such as ours demands not only calling into question the language of certain practices and their particular means of signposting, but also unavoidably leads to an adjustment of the strategy that emerges when the very concept of specificity in reference to artistic products is challenged.

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.

On the other hand, the scarcity of what might properly be labelled ‘Latin American art’, which could allow for a comparison, based on its very own parameters of value, of the diverse phenomena and epiphenomena that have emerged in this context, raises the old questions about usefulness and meaning – although not in an academic sense, but escaping the realm of theory to a place where debating art becomes a matter of life and death. (Some radical responses show that the statement above is far from merely rhetorical.)

And it is this very concept of art that is in doubt when discussing some of the practices carried out in our setting. That which, 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, degrees of development for each, is exactly what is called into question in these other realities (born of dependency, imperialism, authoritarian regimes) through the simple fact of confronting any specificity with our situation’s overall perspective.

However, our marginality in relation to ‘international art’, or rather, our marginality with regards to the history of a so-called international art, is not in itself a well-established reality; it does not constitute an immutable landscape. On the contrary, 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.

To work at the margins of an internationally established art movement means, first and foremost, to doubt the qualifying terms. Duchamp’s premise that art is everything the artist labels as such is not immediately applicable to those whose work defines the terms of their survival (and we mean survival in its most concrete sense) and the fate of their surroundings. That is how, for instance, artistic practices that were fashionable a decade ago, including body art, landscape art or performance art, and which signified international art opening its eyes to new forms of life, are immediate realities in our own landscapes, pre-dating their labelling as art, precisely because of the degree of daily familiarity with these living forms: hungry bodies, vast infertile plains, fallow fields. To operate in this reality, in whatever area we may formally develop this work, implies working with change, with the transformation of the form. It implies, to summarize it in two words, revolutionary practices.

Because they are beyond any mannerisms, the achievements of art in the great international centres – the signifying of the body as medium, of landscape as text – are for us familiar facts, although such familiarity is the result of other types of deprivation. It is not the typical terms of the development of art that define the scene, but rather the contact with the precarious and painful, as well as with the barrenness of concrete lives. There is, then, little that we can learn from artists who define their work as temporal, or as landscape art – hardly anything beyond our own difference, which inevitably leads us not only to shift the limits of our reality, but also to criticize or revise from a global perspective what the avant-garde signifies.

Therein lies the criticism both of art’s self-referential nature and of the specificity of its practice, over which we favour its connectedness in the development of any mise-en-scène that we establish. It is not about launching new products into the international art market – now, from South America – but about establishing a practice that operates within the parameters of our own history. In that sense, any work structured around the random and the indeterminate reveals itself today as a practice that subverts established models and images, in other words, a subversion of life.

And it is in the concrete terms of the developments, the alternatives and the progress of our own history that art – defined in its South American context – acquires its particular dimension. There, inevitably, whatever we do will refer to its own self-impugnation, denying its artistic nature to become instead a political act and referring the political act to its existence as art; and its originator 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. Urgency adds commitment to every fact, every step, and makes them committed to the total course of action, and therefore inescapably confronts them with backdrops of sociability. It is this sociability – not the artist – that defines the degree to which it must cope with reality.

Politics and art share a degree of interchangeability that, if assumed under the idealist notion of a ‘work of art’, redraws the framework within which the artistic act is committed. Political action necessarily presupposes a project, an image of the future whose realization depends on the efficacy of current operations taking into account future coordinates. Merleau-Ponty’s idea – a mistaken revolutionary is more dangerous than a bourgeois – is true insofar as it refers to the definition of public debate, its internal cleavages and the risks of action. The work of art, on the other hand, has always operated with reference to the past. Its efficacy and its value are a function of its ability to recreate the illusion of eternity, of immutability in the face of time, acquiring its greatest value at the moment when it is able to expel from itself all traces of contingency, that is, when it belongs in a Museum. The work is most valued, then, when it takes on the aura of being unreachable by human means. Modern reproduction techniques, from lithograph to videos, depend in turn on the value of the established work of art, preserving continuity inasmuch as those institutionalized works act as guarantors of the new works for those who wish to produce goods that will not depreciate. From this stems the model of artistic action. Its practice implies an image and a perspective of the future and therefore a link to history; therein lies its political character. Its break with frivolous art models is the product of the here and now and is subject to action.

That expectation of change and its role in the field of creative activity which, in the final instance, differentiates what we make here from any trends in contemporary art. The body as a medium for art (body art) is not the same as the body as a vehicle for change, as a real revolutionary agent. Nor is the landscape as a medium for art (as it was on canvas) the same as the landscape as evidence of fallowness. It is this latter condition that condemns the colonized nature so often reflected by the chronology of art in South America. Not that it ‘copies’ what happens in the main centres of art, but whatever the centres have designated as art is consumed here as an experience, and therefore whatever is produced is seen as a political act. The act of copying is a form of confrontation with experience, and not only with the original works. That is what distinguishes the dissociation between artistic production and the collectivity; its schizophrenia comes from a double mismatch: we paint (we make art) one-dimensionally, as if faced with consummated facts, and in turn those facts deny the evidence of their pictorial transfer. Thus, South American art does not intervene in the image of the world, it has not invented perspective, because it is a point of view that reality does not reflect back to it. Instead it is reality itself: the sum total of production that reinvents perspective in art.

It is that settling down amid the multi-dimensionality of the whole of socialized reality that synthetically defines the most conscious Latin American creative practices. Its artistic value is not given by its efficacy in rescuing the immutable ideological conditions that are evidence of a concrete social situation, but in the measure of its ability to go deeper into the symbolic conditions with which the dominant system hides the intentions of its action.

That is where the creative practices, in this case the practice of art, emerge. To operate in the totality of socialized reality is to operate at the production base of that reality and in the specific conditions of its transformation, that is, in the present arrangement of its future. To understand from that vantage point the work of art and to state its efficacy with regards to the construction of a distinct order is to understand fully the only sense in which it is possible to refer to art as a specific practice and assumes its own significance: the work of building its emotions.

To signify emotion, that is the crucial agenda with which artistic action can justify (or not) creative practices in our environment. Emotion establishes the first level of contact with a seemingly inscrutable reality. It constitutes the prehistory of the action and in that sense is the matrix in which the practice will develop. The work with emotion thus becomes, in practice, an operation that aims to capture content. Its value underscores any writing and informs the signifier of any representation. Therein lies the artistic action’s enormous power of transgression in the field of experimentation. Therein, also, lies the extreme and radical character with which many artists and cultural operators have taken on their artistic practice. To establish oneself in that field of significance by referring it to a model of the present as the finality of action, while undermining the Manichean notion of art as an alternative to life, is to subvert frivolous artistic practices and transform them, instead, into militancy.

To work on building emotions, with the aim of creating the tangible marks of a new emotiveness, implies creating a new programme that allows for a plurality of meanings in the creative action as it expands the image of reality. In that programme, the artistic action, faced with its own emerging condition, traces the mental topology that will allow it to access, in the here and now, the necessary conditions for change. In other words, this means operating with real-life conditions, putting them in tension with their history, that is, with the inevitability of its destiny.

In that way the art action and the political act can be distinguished more by a consequence of their fields of impact than by any dualistic or distinct nature. To extract from immediacy an image of the future, and thus create some form of emotionality, is what defines the sphere of artistic action today. To establish a strategy for practice in relation to a theory of the future, that is political action. Nevertheless this distinction is also rhetorical. This can be seen more clearly if we observe that some efforts by the Latin American vanguard in the field of artistic action have already proven that both collective objectives (a classless society) and a militancy towards those objectives can be understood as art.

And it is these efforts, then, that we can properly refer to as ‘The Art of History’, not because they have historical events as their theme (as in Picasso’s Guernica, or Muralismo), but because they make historical development, with the dialectic process of its contradictions and synthesis, the object and the product of art. That is the key issue, and it is there that the CADA has defined itself as a revolutionary force. It may not be easy to understand this, even more so when its concrete nature unveils the contradictions of those who, wanting to reformulate creative space, have been absolutely incapable of even calling into question the art gallery – as demonstrated not long ago by a ‘critique’ that, in the face of prevailing gallery practices, did not hesitate to confront the CADA with anything less than … permanent revolution.

So nominating artistic actions as ‘The Art of History’ is something that must be learned in all its consequences; its success or failure is not separate from the success or failure of the perspectives of total alteration of the environment nor, in the final instance, the creation of a classless society. The work completes the history, and that brings any action into the here and now where that work is at stake. The most immediate precedent for this is the Brigada Ramona Parra. The obliteration of those murals was already contained in the moment of their creation. The times Chile has lived through since then are now part of that unfinished work.

On drawing to a close, we pay homage to them.

CADA

May 1982