Self-Reflexivity as Infra-Structure

Jens Andermann (bio)

A review of Benezra, Karen. Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America. U of California P, 2020.

Over the course of little more than a decade, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Latin American art experienced a wholesale transformation. As evidenced by the diverse group invited to participate in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark 1970 survey exhibition Information (Marta Minujin, Carlos D’Alessio, Cildo Meirelles, Hélio Oiticia, and Artur Barrio, among others), Latin American artists increasingly challenged earlier neo-avant-gardist references such as Concrete, Informal, or Minimalist art, embarking instead on a process of homegrown conceptual and political radicalization. Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby—then a leading proponent of arte de los medios (media art) with Raúl Escari—succinctly describes the sentiment at the time, reflecting on how he and his fellow artists around Buenos Aires’s trend-setting Instituto Di Tella art school

entered a crazy race which, in just a few years, brought plastic artists to move from the bidimensional space of the painting to the object, in its multiple variants, and from there to concept-based works, to messages that reflect on themselves, and on to the dissolution of the very idea of work and its extension to the transformations operated by the mass communication media as well as to the framings of their context and to signposting social life, etc. All these approaches removed painters from their relationships with traditional materials, and brought them to reflect on their positions vis-à-vis the cultural institutions of the bourgeoisie, on the possibilities of carrying out a transformative practice, and on the best ways of taking it forward: the avant-garde became politicized.(qtd. in Longoni and Mestman 58; my translation)

Writing in 1966 on Hélio Oiticica’s early “ambientations,” Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa notes that this new cycle is “no longer purely artistic but cultural”; instead of the isolated, self-referential work, “what is dominant is the perceptive-sensory ensemble.” He speculates that this shift might also herald a broader turn towards an altogether new social and political role for the aesthetic, one he tentatively proposes to call “postmodern art” (Pedrosa 205).

Recent art-historical scholarship and curatorial proposals reflect a re-ignited interest in Latin American late modernism, exemplified by recent shows such as the Hammer Museum’s 2019 Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 and the Migros Museum’s 2016–2017 Resistance Performed: Aesthetic Strategies Under Repressive Regimes in Latin America. In her in-depth study of the period, Karen Benezra argues that scholars and curators have too rapidly glossed over the years separating the conceptualist moment from a fully-fledged “political art” that began with the landmark 1968 Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Is Burning) in Argentina or the ground-breaking 1970 Brazilian show Do Corpo à Terra (From Body to Ground, curated by Frederico Morais, who coined the concept of guerrilla art in the same year). On today’s global museum circuit, Benezra suggests, “Latin American modernism” is coded as always already incipient political intervention, something other than purely art in a way that “implies its fusion with life within the closed historical horizon of the short twentieth century” (166). By contrast, Benezra refuses to take the dissolution of the work-as-object—and its gradual replacement by self-reflexive stagings of artistic practice (in its double relationship with the art system and everyday social life)—as an interstitial moment en route to an avowedly political art practice. Instead, her book zeroes in on the moment of dematerialization itself. Rather than using the term in a descriptive and historicizing sense, Benezra endows dematerialization with conceptual and analytical valences, allowing us “to reconsider the relationship between antiformalist art and sociopolitical transformation” (2). She argues that, insofar as “the ‘material’ at stake in art and design’s dematerialization is not only that of the physical, tangible object, but also the objective, historical specificity of the intertwined logic and ideology that produce and reproduce social relations” (4), dematerialization can serve as “a certain kind of operational self-reflexivity” (167) present both in artistic practice and in the critical reflection that responds to it (and which becomes increasingly enmeshed with and indistinguishable from that artistic practice as it becomes more “dematerialized”). In current American artistic and art-historical circles, dematerialization is deployed as a means to an end, a way of naming the move away from the self-enclosed “work” and towards open-ended, propositional “practices”; Benezra cites Lucy Lippard’s landmark 1968 essay “The Dematerialization of Art” as a key example. But in the usage of Latin American artist-intellectuals—such as the Argentine psychoanalyst and semiotician Oscar Masotta or his compatriot, the designer, painter, and theoretician Tomás Maldonado (the subjects of chapters 1 and 4, respectively)—the term comes to stand for art’s problematic relation to social totality. Art can neither claim autonomy (in terms of its regime of production and circulation) from this whole, nor can it blend immediately into it as yet another instance of “resistance performed” (to quote the title of the Migros Museum’s recent retrospective).

Her book’s subtitle is something of a misnomer; in truth, and contrary to what we might expect, Benezra’s study is not a survey of art and design in Latin America, or even of the relations between the two. Rather, it offers a series of punctual engagements with key instances of critical self-reflexivity on the part of selected artists and writers, all of whom are situated on the uncertain boundary between artistic practice, politics, and theory. Chapter 1 charts the work of Oscar Masotta, in particular his book-length essay El “pop-art” (1967) and its shorter sequel, “Después del pop: nosotros desmaterializamos” (“After Pop: We Dematerialize”), collected in Conciencia y estructura (Consciousness and Structure, 1968). Benezra discusses Masotta’s production of “anti-happenings,” including El helicóptero (The Helicopter, 1966), a parallel staging of different events under the same name that drew attention to the regime of producing representations and its structuring ideological matrices as audience members discussed and disputed their experiences. She also considers El mensaje fantasma (Phantom Message, 1966), which set up a feedback loop between a street poster and a TV ad in a kind of mass-medial Moebius strip. Both actions resonate strongly with Grupo Arte de los Medios’s conceptualization of media art, particularly their seminal non-event Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar), produced the same year.

Chapter 2 leaps to the opposite end of the subcontinent and Mexican poet-philosopher Octavio Paz’s series of engagements with the work of Marcel Duchamp. Benezra asserts that Paz’s engagements “articulate a theory of art after modernism and a theory of communality or social being after modernity” as well as offering “a theory of art’s dematerialization” (65). Rather than as shock-like ruptures of medial circuits that could produce critical and consciousness-raising effects, as for Masotta and the Arte de los Medios group, Paz

tends to view non-object-based works like happenings as immediately ritualistic and communitarian in nature in that they have left behind both the modernist emphasis on the hand of the artist and the self-critical mythological symbolism that he imputes to [Duchamp’s] The Bride. (97)

“Dematerialization,” in the Mexican poet’s hands, comes to underwrite a “peculiarly postmodern Romanticism” (79). In Chapter 3, we are taken to the opposite end of the Mexican cultural spectrum for a discussion of the loosely interconnected artistic collectives known as Los Grupos (The Groups). Through the 1960s and 1970s, they advanced “the collectivization of artistic practice” as a way of making “the crisis of art’s social authority” conversant with “the social form of labor” and its transformations in the advent of neoliberal modernization (104–5). Benezra references the work of artist-theoreticians Alberto Híjar Serrano and Felipe Ehrenberg, specifically the latter’s 1970 London show Seventh Day Chicken.

Chapter 4 pivots from artistic practices to industrial design, focusing on Gui Bonsiepe, German designer and disciple of Maldonado at the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung, HfG). Benezra considers his role in the short-lived Chilean Cybersyn project: the computational planning of socialized industrial production under Salvador Allende’s Unión Popular government. Bonsiepe’s retro-futuristic Operations Room—with its Star Trek-like swirling chairs and datafeed screens—provides the central nexus for a sweeping reading of the HfG Ulm’s controversies on functionalism, of the politics of cybermanagement in its complex and ambivalent relation to Chilean domestic politics, and of global political and socio-economic constellations during the final years of crisis of the post-WWII welfare state.

Benezra’s criteria for selecting this corpus over others are not always clear, and the absence of any substantial discussion of Brazilian post-Concretist art is somewhat mystifying. Yet her in-depth engagement with Masotta, Paz, Híjar, Ehrenberg and Bonsiepe—not just as producers of artworks but as authors of art and design theory and criticism—offers an important corrective to art history’s common approach to the Global South as a provider of aesthetic “raw material” to be processed and refined by Northern metropolitan curation. The downside of giving over large parts of the book to the artists’ and theorists’ critical writings on dematerialization (as opposed to the artworks themselves) is that the feedback loops between ‘art theory’ and ‘practice’ they set in motion remain at times more abstractly implied than concretely illustrated. The chapter on Masotta, for instance, would have benefited from a more extensive discussion of the Grupo Arte de los Medios and of the trajectory of Jacoby in particular; Jacoby’s subsequent interaction with the Rosario-based group around Graciela Carnevale and Juan Pablo Renzi produced the legendary Ciclo de Arte Experimental and ultimately the counter-informational circuit of Tucumán Arde. This context would have added depth to the discussion of Masotta’s work.

Benezra argues that Masotta’s writings on art occupy a crossroads where “the theoretical and practical imply each other and become legible together” (36). This claim could be extended to the other authors under study, and in fact constitutes one of the main tenets of her analysis as a whole. For Masotta, the artwork itself is already conceptually productive in its own right “at the disjunctive point between consciousness and structure” (31). In a detailed archaeology of its successive iterations, Benezra shows that Masotta’s notion of dematerialization—“as an interrogation into the logic or structuration of structure as such” (36)—comes into being in response to the controversy around the 1964 Di Tella prize. International jurors Clement Greenberg and Pierre Restany presented rival accounts of modernist art, the former praising abstract expressionism and the latter advocating for an object-based new materialism. In contrast, Masotta’s preference for pop must be read as “a metacritical polemic” (40) that seeks out the real as a structuring absence in the symbolic codes of mass culture that pop art brings into relief. Pop art “both describes and performs the experience of apperception” of the code (47), which the ideological work of mass-cultural apparatuses renders otherwise inaccessible. Thus, Benezra concludes,

Masotta’s proposal for art’s dematerialization addresses the genesis of structure on two levels: both as a philosophical problem for materialism and as practical artistic response to the historical novelty of a society formally subsumed under the mass media. (47)

Conversely, for Tomás Maldonado (in his almost simultaneous polemic with Max Bill over the transformative properties of functionalist design), dematerialization names a critical inflection; the earlier trust in design’s capacity to supersede the consumer object’s (mis)appropriation of use value gives way to an idea that style exceeds (social) function, at the same time pointing to the transformative potential latent in the design object’s own formal excess. During Maldonado’s time at the Ulm School of Design, and prior to its closure in 1968, the school’s focus gradually passed from the material object to the machinic patterns and cybernetic management of its production, into which “design planning” would intervene in an attempt at “expanding the field of applications for industrial design from household consumer objects to technological and information systems” (140). Bonsiepe attempted to bring this notion of design planning to the project of rationalized industrial production (itself cybernetic) under the umbrella of the Chilean Social Property Area, aiming to “find a new social outlet for the spiritual significance of form”: “the implementation of design planning in the Third World would transcend the rationalist impetus for modernization that had motivated the previous generation and transform it into a tool of social emancipation” (142). Benezra reads the ambivalent role of “stylistic excess” (147) in Bonsiepe’s Operations Room as at once standing in for and exposing the absence of technological infrastructure that would have enabled the project to make good on its promises. The example is fascinating insofar as she is able to show, through close analysis of its design operations, how “Cybersyn reveals the historical context and limitations of both the Popular Unity’s accelerationism and the utopian underpinnings of the HfG Ulm’s embrace of technique” (148). On Benezra’s reading, dematerialization becomes a methodology for investigating late-modernist Latin American art and design’s proleptic or anticipatory capacity: the ways in which it exposed and forecast an epochal transformation in social regimes of production that were only beginning to take hold at the time.

Jens Andermann teaches at NYU and is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He is the author of Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (2018, forthcoming in English from Northwestern), New Argentine Cinema (2011), The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007), and Mapas de poder: una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (2000). His current work explores unspecific aesthetics as modes of survival in the inmundo, or earthwide precarity.

Works Cited

• Longoni, Ana and Mariano Mestman, eds. Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino. Eudeba, 2008.
• Pedrosa, Mário. “Arte ambiental, arte pós-moderna, Hélio Oiticia.” (1966) Dos Murais de Portinari aos Espaços de Brasília. Perspectiva, 1980.