A SEMBLANCE OF POLITICS: THE DEMATERIALIZATION OF ART AND LABOR IN ARGENTINA, MEXICO AND CHILE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Karen Gail Benezra August 2013 © 2013 Karen Gail Benezra A SEMBLANCE OF POLITICS: THE DEMATERIALIZATION OF ART AND LABOR IN ARGENTINA, MEXICO AND CHILE Karen Gail Benezra Cornell University 2013 This dissertation studies the purported political radicalization of experimental art and design in the late 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, Mexico and Chile. Through the examination of artists, designers and critics including the Grupo Arte de los Medios, Oscar Masotta, Octavio Paz, Oscar Bony, Felipe Ehrenberg, the Groups Movement, Gui Bonsiepe and the cybernetic management project Cybersyn, I study how terms and problems such as the avant-garde, the socialization of art and the mutual implication of industrial design and management contemplated art’s relationship to the social relations of production at a moment in which the challenge to art’s traditional supports and the intensified socialization of productive labor made these two realms increasingly difficult to distinguish. In the Argentinean case, I show how Oscar Masotta and the Grupo Arte de los Medios pointed to the de-naturalization of ideology as the task of the avant-garde and, at the same time, to the limit of this same procedure in the inseparability of image and enjoyment. In the Mexican case, I argue that the Groups addressed the Revolutionary legacy of art’s socialization by simultaneously inhabiting the form of the artists’ collective and re-defining both art and artistic labor as cultural work within the social relations of production. The Groups thus point to the political potential inherent in their organizational form both through and against the muralist legacy. In the Chilean case, I argue that Cybersyn consummated the fraught relationship between art and industry that defined the avant-garde of the Bauhaus and Ulm School of Design by transforming the sticky question of style into the infrastructure of subjectivation in the management of the Chilean workforce. Style thus marks the thin line joining and separating auto-poiesis and praxis. Whether through the intervention into the mass media, the collectivization of cultural work or the making operative of style through the infrastructural function of industrial design, I argue that each case points to a form of ideological mediation that cleaves close to the figure and process of capitalist self- reproduction while still insisting on this slight subjective gap as the space of its potential politicization and critique. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Karen Benezra was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her B.A. from Bard College in 2004 before pursuing her doctorate in Romance Studies at Cornell University. She has served on the editorial board of diacritics and continues to work as a corresponding editor for ARTMargins. Karen is happy to be returning to the city of her birth. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my special committee members, Bruno Bosteels, Tracy McNulty and Geoffrey Waite for their time and perspicacity as readers, interlocutors and collaborators well beyond the bounds of dissertation writing and revision. Like the groups it studies, this work has in many ways been a collective effort. I must thank the members of the Society for the Humanities Dissertation Writing Group, the Institute for Comparative Modernities Late Capitalism in Latin America Reading Group, the Brett de Barry Interdisciplinary Mellon Revolutionary Writing Group and the Theories of the Subject, Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Seminar in the Humanities. I am most grateful for the opportunity to participate in these projects and am particularly indebted to Zac Zimmer, Osvaldo de la Torre and Kyong Min Son for their insightful suggestions for reading and revision. I owe many thanks as well to the members of the Cornell Psychoanalysis Reading Group for allowing me to read alongside them for the past six years without the expectation of recompense. I am especially thankful to Daniel Wilson, Shanna Carlson and Andrew Bielski for their patience, intelligence and friendship throughout. I am equally grateful to Oscar Cabezas, Gustavo Furtado, Perla Wilson Arenas, Simón Pérez Wilson and Carlos Pérez Soto for their generosity and companionship in myriad capacities over the years. I would like to thank my parents, Enid and Jack, for their support throughout the trials of coursework, travel and writing. I am grateful, finally, to my husband, Pablo, for his tolerance, encouragement and love at every moment. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. The Media Art Group: Ideology and Critique “After Pop” 8 Introduction 8 The Di Tella in the Context of the Revolución Libertadora 13 Institution and Avant-Garde 25 The Media Art Group 38 After Pop and After 51 The Material Support of Rebellion 64 La familia obrera as Artifice 78 2. To Reconcile Art and the People: Octavio Paz and the Groups Movement 104 Introduction 104 Real Subsumption 108 Paz and Duchamp 111 The Syndicate of Technical Workers, Artists and Painters and its Antimonies 131 Popular Fiction 143 The Emergence of the Groups 148 3. Cybersyn: A Revolution in Style 171 Introduction 171 La vía chilena al socialismo 177 The Viable System Model 179 The Four Discourses: Production and Style 196 The Ulm School of Design 211 v Bibliography 226 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Puzzovio, Squirru and Giménez, ¿Por qué son tan geniales? 21 Figure 1.2 Puzzovio, Squirru and Giménez, ¿Por qué son tan geniales? 22 Figure 1.3 Jacoby, Mensaje en el Di Tella 31 Figure 1.4 Warhol, Ambulance Disaster 37 Figure 1.5 Masotta, El helicopter 39 Figure 1.6 Masotta, El helicóptero 40 Figure 1.7 Masotta, El helicóptero 41 Figure 1.8 Masotta, El mensaje fantasma 47 Figure 1.9 Masotta, El mensaje fantasma 48 Figure 1.10 Ferrari, La civilización occidental y cristiana 53 Figure 1.11 Carnevale, En el mundo hay salida para todos 54 Figure 1.12 Favario, Untitled 55 Figure 1.13 Ruano, Untitled (Fuera yanquis de Vietnam) 56 Figure 1.14 Roberto Plate, Untitled (Baño) 57 Figure 1.15 Margarita Paksa, Comunicaciones 58 Figure 1.16 Margarita Paksa, Comunicaciones 59 Figure 1.16 Bony, La familia obrera 80 Figure 1.17 Greco, Vivo-Ditos 81 Figure 1.18 Greco, Vivo-Ditos 82 Figure 1.19 Bony, La familia obrera 83 Figure 2.1 Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) 112 Figure 2.2 Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) 113 Figure 2.3 Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) 113 Figure 2.4 Duchamp, Box in a Valise 120 Figure 2.5 Paz and Rojo, Marcel Duchamp 120 Figure 2.6 Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 121 Figure 2.7 Diagram of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even 122 Figure 2.8 Courbet, The Origin of the World 123 Figure 2.9 Masson, Terre érotique 123 Figure 2.10 Coen, Torso; Felipe Ehrenberg, La caída; Felipe Ehrenberg, Arte conceptual 147 Figure 2.11 Espinosa, El Circuito Interno 151 Figure 2.12 FMTC, “Principios-reglamento” 152 Figure 2.13 FMTC, “Principios-reglamento” 153 Figure 2.14 PP, 1929: Proceso 154 Figure 2.15 No-Grupo, “Intervención editorial en Revista Artes Visuales” 161 Figure 2.16 La Lonchera 162 Figure 2.17 Herrera, “Esta coca-cola, recién descubierta por el Pop-Art...” 163 Figure 2.18 Ehrenberg, Garbage Walk 167 Figure 2.19 Ehrenberg, Garbage Walk 167 Figure 3.1 Bonsiepe, Cybersyn Operations Room 172 Figure 3.2 Beer, Viable System Model 181 Figure 3.3 Lacan’s formula for the four discourses 196 vii Figure 3.4 Ossa and Rivera, Multinode_Metagame 222 Figure 3.5 Ossa and Rivera, Multinode_Metagame 223 viii This dissertation studies the political radicalization of experimental art and design in Argentina, Mexico and Chile in the 1960s and 70s, arguing that we understand the critical value of such gestures through, but also beyond, the immediacy of their transgressive claims or utopian social propositions. My readings thus brush against the grain of a growing corpus of art historical and cultural criticism that has arisen over the last twenty years in response to the archival dispersion or institutional marginalization of works and movements like the ones examined here during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Such criticism has tended to locate the inherently political or emancipatory nature of such artistic works and movements as the feature that defines their critical import for the present. I argue that the works considered here are both more historically and socially complex and also more critically self-reflexive, or at least symptomatically charged, than claims based on their determinate content or immediate historical context can support. They asked how and why art should define itself with regard to other, heteronymous forms of social communication and labor, in short, to the social relations of production at the moment in which capitalist development would seem to blur this distinction. At the same time, they attempted to re-define the avant-garde or to grapple with the shortcomings of its earlier instantiations. In each case, I try to show how the contemplation of art or industrial design’s social function was mediated by a shift in the regime of capitalist accumulation and the forms of subjective constitution and control it produced. Two basic suppositions ground my choice of objects, periodization and theoretical framework. The first is that the shift from industrial to post-industrial capitalism insinuated itself in the global periphery even though its articulation at the social and economic level was neither uniform nor complete.