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109 In the last two chapters we saw the continuing influence of avant-garde activities that proposed different conceptualizations of the relationships between art and society as an undercurrent in poetry performances of the midcentury until very recently. In chapter 2 changing roles for poetry relative to avant-garde goals manifested themselves in the tension we observed between Nicomedes Santa Cruz’s commercial success and the ideals of Hora Zero. This opposition was in some ways reinforced and at the same time undermined in the next chapter, which examined artistic experimentation and the adaptation and circulation of Neruda’s and Vallejo’s work. The kinds of reworkings, translations, and performances of these major poets’ works that we examined are emblematic of a broader shift in the concept of the poet’s role, a shift that began midcentury when the poem’s author more frequently assumed a secondary relationship to his or her product. In some ways, then, these performances of canonical poets’ works act out Barthes’s “Death of the Author” (in which writing trumps writer) and respond to Foucault’s question “What is an Author?” by demonstrating how a name unifies and, in some cases, may lend an aura of legitimacy or prestige to a body of work but not determine its meaning. Publishing about the same time as Barthes and Foucault and extending his earlier idea of antipoesía (1954), Chilean Nicanor Parra brought similar questions to the forefront in his Artefactos [Artifacts] (1972), a collection that challenged the boundaries between word and image, page and postcard, and elite art and mass communication. Parra’s work, a collection of postcards with images and slogans, questioned the concept of the book chapter four Aesthetic Experiment and Political Commitment Promulgating Poetry in Streets, Cafés, on CDs, and on the Internet 110 · Chapter 4 and begged the question: What is poetry? He joined and juxtaposed photos, drawings, and texts to create an ironic dialogue between images, writing, and their material presentation that produced laughter and often critical reflection on modern Western culture. As in his antipoesía, he attempted to demystify poetry as he created it. A striking example of his antiautoría [antiauthorship ] stance is the poem “La poesía chilena se endecasilabó,” in which he unites the text with the image of a declaiming statue.1 Parra’s text celebrates poetry’s rebellion against inherited structures in a playful tone. In the visual image the statue that monumentalizes the achievements of this new poet is garbed in classic robes: with a Napoleonic hat and tomes under his arm, he gestures and sweats as he speaks. Rather than hail the new poet, the monument to the contemporary hero grapples with the burden of tradition , and whether he is making a speech about poetry or declaiming his work he is clearly a struggling protagonist of innovation. Parra, like Barthes and Foucault, came to his ideas that probed traditional genres and authorial roles in the 1950s and 1960s. The Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer sees a corollary between Parra’s ideas and the rise of conceptual art in Latin American art, noting that, in the 1960s, “artists were coming to see themselves as fulfilling a role somewhere between catalyst and stage director” (148). Parra, like the artists of his generation in other countries, questioned his own role, his mode of production, and the traditional ways in which poetry had circulated, and he invited his readers to explore these issues. Therefore, while literary theorists may link shifts in the position of the author to the influence of structuralism, they are also embedded in the broader transnational social and cultural activism that characterized the 1960s, a decade that witnessed a range of activities that sought to deinstitutionalize art and fulfill one of the earlier avant-gardes’ goals of reintegrating art and society. With the increasing rise of mass media and multiplying modes of communication, a process of artistic and political radicalization and resistance occurred globally (continuing the dialogue Fernando Rosenberg observed in the early part of the century). Camnitzer states that, while in conversation with other movements (such as that of the Situationist International, which encouraged poetry to be an event, without poems [Camnitzer 254]), in Latin America, “Art, education, poetry and politics converge and do so for reasons rooted in the Latin American experience ” (73). Throughout the region there are experiments with happenings and action art, rock music and nueva canción [new song], and media art and “works intended to expand the...

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