The 1968 Aesthetic and Political Radicalization in the Argentinian Avant-Garde

Abstract

This chapter summarizes our extensive research begun in the 1990s and carried out about the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard in 1968 in Argentina. We published the result of this research in the book Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde” in 2000. Later, we revisited this experience and re-discussed its memory, especially the construction of a mythical narrative about Tucumán Arde as an exceptional event. Tucumán Arde, the best-known collective action of the Argentine avant-garde movement during the 1960s, is usually regarded as an isolated milestone, an exceptional event. However, this chapter considers it instead as the corollary of the hectic process of aesthetic and political radicalization of the experimental artistic groups of the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario, and intends to contextualize that production within this historical period.In the mid-1960s, in reaction to events such as the US invasion of Santo Domingo, the Vietnam War and Che Guevara’s murder in Bolivia, politics irrupted into wider sectors of society, further radicalizing the avant-garde developments. A number of artists then envisaged their productions as a legitimate arena for taking a political stand as a way of contributing to the transformation of reality within the context of the revolutionary expectations that marked the age. Consequently, in 1968, a series of collective statements and actions signaled the avant-garde’s rupture with the art institutions, especially the Di Tella Institute, which had until then preponderantly sheltered their manifestations. The most politicized of these artists then shifted closer to the labor movement adverse to the military dictatorship that ruled the country and proposed a “new aesthetic,” inscribed in the revolutionary process they regarded as imminent and inevitable, which conceived violence and experimental action as legitimate forces capable of reshaping the conditions of life. It is at this particular crossroads that Tucumán Arde was carried out, and its abrupt closing under strong pressure by the government was followed by the disbanding of the groups and their abandonment of art altogether to end up in many cases adopting political militancy.A first and shorter version of this chapter was included in Jinshil Lee and Jin Kwon, eds.