Between code and message: Argentine conceptual art, 1966--1976
Item
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Title
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Between code and message: Argentine conceptual art, 1966--1976
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ea3af9483964:11004
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identifier
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10732
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Creator
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Quiles, Daniel R.,
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Contributor
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Romy Golan
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art history | Latin American studies | Argentina | Conceptual art | Dictatorship | Media | Political art | Structuralism
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Abstract
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This dissertation historicizes and theorizes the emergence and refinement of conceptual art in Argentina between the years 1966 and 1976. The conceptual turn, commonly understood as the shift from painting and sculpture to multimedia event- and language-based artistic practices in the 1960s and 1970s, took on an activist dimension in this context. A group of artists in Argentina collaboratively developed an educational role for art in the face of the dictatorship's control over a relatively new and increasingly powerful mass media. Argentine conceptual art as it is understood here can be traced back to one figure in particular, Oscar Masotta, a cultural theorist, pedagogue, and occasional artist who argued that artists such as Andy Warhol were engaged in a semiotic project of stripping away the content, or message, of the popular image to reveal the code, or underlying structure, that allowed the message to be delivered. Masotta and a circle of artists with whom he was working expanded this technique to include other systems that could be similarly analyzed: genres of art such as the happening, exhibition space, the art institution, the mass media, and the state. This process of extricating code and message has a crucial consequence: once analyzed, the system at hand can no longer deliver its message, either because its code has become too conspicuous or because it has been dissembled into parts. In 1968, Masotta's techniques were incorporated into a larger collaborative project titled Tucuman Arde, which staged protest exhibitions against the dictatorship's economic policies at union halls. For the artists involved in this project, it was not enough to merely analyze codes. A replacement message had to be substituted for the one that had been undermined. This dissertation traces the shared development of these conceptual strategies up to and after 1968, and the abandonment of art by most of the artists involved in Tucuman Arde. With worsening political conditions in Argentina in the 1970s, the conceptual strategies utilized by Masotta and Tucuman Arde were adapted to address political oppression from an increasingly powerless position.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
