Avant-Garde Argentinian Visual Artists Group, Tucumán Burns (1968)

Abstract

Tucumán Arde (hereafter referred to by its English translation, Tucumán Burns), nearly half a century after its opening in 1968, still remains largely unclassifiable. Part information campaign, part research endeavor, part political action, part counter-information exhibition, part collective art happening, part mythical legend, and part abysmal failure, it sought to have a direct impact on the revolutionary process then regarded as imminent by its artist-participants. More has been written about Tucumán Burns than about any other Argentine art event, and it continues to have a surprising capacity to be appropriated by very different arguments, positions, and genealogies, many of which seem to separate themselves from and even contradict the organizers’ original and radical intentions.