Nestor Perlongher and the Avant-Garde: Privileged Interlocuters and Inherited Techniques

This essay examines the relationship between the Argentine poet and anthropologist Néstor Perlongher (1949-92) and the historical avant-garde. Throughout his career Perlongher sought to create and investigate spaces for desire and communities based on desire. The paper examines some of the key interlocutors that he chose for this project, and the nature of the poetic relationship between his work and theirs. Perlongher identified himself in essays and interviews throughout his career as responding to an avant-garde tradition, in particular the work of Oliverio Girondo, Enrique Molina, and Juan Gelman, writers either directly involved in avant-garde groups in Argentina, or who offer links from the vanguard to later works. I aim then to identify and question this relationship with the avant-garde and its immediate followers in Argentina, attempting to identify the elements that Perlongher takes from their work in terms of poetics, aesthetics and thematics. I also investigate the ways in which Perlongher's work diverges from or goes beyond that of his stated interlocutors. In conclusion, I attempt to assess the possible aims for Perlongher's relationship with and appropriation of the avant-garde given critical reservations about the possibilities for neo-avant-garde art.