Vanguardia, internacionalismo y politica: Arte argentino en los anos sesenta (review)

Argentine art historian Andrea Giunta's book presents a detailed and nuanced account of Argentine art in the 1960s. A relentlessly and profoundly dense fabric of information, issues, and interpretation, her work is so thick with references as to be virtually two texts running simultaneously: the main text and the notes that provide the documentary armature. It is a complex tale of the trajectories of policies, institutions, associated narratives, and visual responses that take place in three discrete but intertwined geographies: Buenos Aires and Argentina, Argentina and Paris (Europe), and, finally, Argentina and New York (the United States). At stake here for Buenos Aires/Argentina is the formulation of a modernist-internationalist project by a solidifying art infrastructure bent on putting Buenos Aires on the art historical map. This has meant establishing this cosmopolitan city as the third point of a triangle of international art centers, namely, Paris–New York–Argentina, thus linking Latin America finally and equally with Europe and the United States. The book traces the center's star ascent, zenith, and fizzling out. Giunta's work writes this process into view—a significant point, for although the goal is not totally fulfilled, the process nevertheless has written Buenos Aires/Argentina large in the symbolic geography of modern art.

That we are dealing here with a very complex process is, interestingly, suggested by the book's cover, on which we find reproduced Antonio Berni's tempera-on-burlap painting titled Manifestación (Demonstration [1934]). To be more precise, the image is replicated in triplicate—in color images on the front and back, and also as the background of the entire cover, a gray screen on which the color versions and the type float. Berni's work emphatically presents local politics in the language of the (social) realism of its time. Workers are compressed into a mass that oozes inexorably toward the viewer, cramped into the off-kilter space of a plaza, in the background of which nondescript buildings seem to fence in the demonstrators, one of whom carries a sign that reads “bread and work.” It is a committed painting by a committed artist. This replicated image unavoidably establishes an interesting juxtaposition with the title of the book itself.

How ironic that this image invites us into a work on vanguardism, internationalism, and politics in Argentine art in the 1960s. Only a plunge into the depths of the book shows us that it is the humble burlap used as the “canvas” for the tempera, as well as the direct allusion made to Manifestación, by Luis Felipe Noé in Introducción a la esperanza (Introduction to hope [1963]), that summon Berni's painting into the period that Giunta covers. Locally found materials, ones of refuse and rejection, were often the raw materials for the vanguard, internationalist art of the 1960s. Noé's response to Berni's work raises the question of how local politics and political action could find their way into 1960s Argentine art. It might be argued that Berni's painting sets up several of the issues and questions raised by Giunta. Perhaps we should take advantage of the insistent contradiction between the image in triplicate, which falls outside what the book's title offers us, to set up some of the central questions posed and responded to by Giunta in her project of setting Argentina (read, Buenos Aires) as a center of international and modern (read, vanguard) art in the post-Perón 1960s. To wit: What language? What materials? What content? What relation to art of the past? What relation to the tradition of the social realism of Mexican artists? What identity is displayed and understood? Who reads it? Who judges it? Who displays it? What are the tactics particular to the 1960s? What map is it placed on? What role does this elusive but somehow also...