Avant-Garde Argentinian Visual Artists Group, Tucumán Arde

Abstract

Tucumán Arde, still, nearly half a century after 1968, remains largely unclassifiable. Part information campaign, part research endeavor, part political action, part collective art happening, part mythical legend, part abysmal failure, it was, among the many things that it was and the many more that it wanted to be, also an artist-curated exhibition. But perhaps, more precisely, counter-information exhibition would be the better term. To understand what Tucumán Arde was, to situate it, and importantly also to understand why its organizers opted -entre otras estrategias- for the exhibition as a form at all, and what they did with that form, it is perhaps necessary to trace the context of the general political and institutional pressures informing the group's motivations and their political agenda as artists in the period leading up to it.