"Body and Action: Performative Moments in Argentine Art," with Rodrigo Alonso
Through movements, gestures, postures, and actions, the body becomes a dynamic tool for communicating narratives, exploring identities, and challenging social conventions—a direct vehicle for the transmission of meanings. In the exhibition "What the Night Tells the Day," there is a strong physical presence, more or less suggested, but clearly eloquent in the works of Graciela Sacco and Mariela Scafati; in the images of Liliana Maresca nude and in those of Alberto Greco and Mariana Belloto, artists who serve as the starting point for this Masterclass led by art historian and critic Rodrigo Alonso.
Since the first cuts made by Lucio Fontana on canvas, Argentine art began to incorporate action as one of its creative tools. With it, the artists' bodies took on a leading role, while the category of the art object began to disintegrate, giving way to the ephemeral, the circumstantial, and temporal processes—areas to be addressed during this session at the Proa Auditorium.
"In their own way, each artist transforms their own body and life into an exploratory terrain from which poetic and radical productions emerge. Later, with the idea of prolonging performative works over time, artists began to document their actions, first through photography and then, when it became technologically available, through video. The incorporation of the image introduced the possibility of creating pieces with the sole purpose of being recorded, which gave rise to photoperformance and videoperformance," Alonso recalls.
The body, action, the ephemeral, the spectator, and the complex themes addressed by performance art contribute to expanding the boundaries of art and opening new avenues for expression—these are some of the topics we will review in this masterclass.
Rodrigo Alonso holds a degree in Arts from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), specializing in contemporary art and new media. He is a professor at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the University of Salvador (USal), and the National University of the Arts (UNA). He was also a professor and advisory committee member for the Master's in Curatorial Studies and Cultural Practices in Art and New Media at the Media Centre d’Art i Disseny (MECAD) in Barcelona, Spain, and has been a guest professor at prominent universities, conferences, and international forums in Latin America and Europe. Alonso is a writer, curator, critic, and contributor to books, art magazines, and catalogs. His published books include Muntadas. Con/Textos (Buenos Aires, 2002), Ansia y Devoción (Buenos Aires, 2003), and Jaime Davidovich. Video Works. 1970-2000 (New York, 2004). He has curated contemporary art exhibitions in the most important spaces in Argentina and Latin America, as well as in prestigious European institutions.
"Conceptual Art and Literature in the Works of Greco, Bustos, Gallardo, Macchi, and Erlich," with Florencia Garramuño
In this discussion with Florencia Garramuño, we aim to unravel the multiple forms that the obsession with reality took in Argentine culture from the 1970s onward, and to trace the ways in which this obsession eroded the boundaries of art, paving the way for the multiplicity of contemporary artistic languages and their various modes of social intervention.
Since then, many aesthetic explorations have sought to expand artistic disciplines: while literature opened itself to the banal and the everyday, stretching the boundaries of its genres to incorporate new definitions of the poetic and the narrative, in the field of visual arts, painting and sculpture descended from the wall and pedestal to unfold across space in installations, performances, and videos. From Alberto Greco's so-called vivo-dito art to Ana Gallardo's drawings that incorporate writing, or Adriana Bustos' videos built from documentary material, the arts have broadened the boundaries of their specific mediums to blend not only with other artistic media—such as Gallardo’s paintings or Sergio Chejfec’s texts that seek inspiration from photography for a type of literature that replaces narration with documentation—but also to incorporate elements foreign to the world of art and literature, like Jorge Macchi's suitcase or Leonardo Erlich's brooms.
In addition to the work of Greco, Bustos, Gallardo, Macchi, and Erlich, we will discuss some paradigmatic works of contemporary Argentine literature (Juan José Saer, Sergio Chejfec, Tamara Kamenszain, Sylvia Molloy) that, between denunciation, testimony, and the opacity sometimes demanded by censorship—or often, more than real censorship, the inherent difficulty in accessing the incommensurable meanings of traumatic or even everyday experiences—developed strategies and devices for reflecting on and presenting reality. These strategies allow us to accompany and discuss, through comparison, some developments in contemporary Argentine art featured in the exhibition What the Night Tells the Day.
Florencia Garramuño holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. She is a full professor in the Humanities Department at the University of San Andrés and an independent researcher at CONICET. Her publications include Cultural Genealogies: Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the Contemporary Novel, 1980-1990; Primitive Modernities: Tango, Samba, and Nation; The Opaque Experience; Worlds in Common: Essays on Specificity in Art; Cannibal Brazil: Between Bossa Nova and the Far Right; and The Improper Life: Anonymity and Singularity.