Oscar Masotta Segunda Vez
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Cahier No. 2 Oscar Masotta Segunda Vez A research project led by Dora García Oscar Masotta Segunda Vez Cahier No. 2 A research project led by Dora García Table of Contents 4 Dora García Buenos Aires Is Not a Swedish City 9 Oscar Masotta After Pop, We Dematerialize (1967) 20 Cloe Masotta We’ll Have to Find a Way of Meeting Each Other Soon 23 Oscar Masotta Letters legacy. Entitled La Eterna, the film closes with these words considers “abominable,” is that the “explosion” of the word with which informational works of this type are made by the Paris-based Argentinian philosopher Gabriel Catren “happening” in the press is, in some ways, “a positive pheno- is none other than the processes, the results, the facts, Buenos Aires (we’re leaving the English unedited): menon,” because “it somehow represents a becoming aware and/or the phenomena of information set off by the of our lack of seriousness.” And Masotta comments: mass information media (examples of “media” include: Is Not a Gabriel Catren: Masotta is someone that, in a certain radio, television, dailies, newspapers, magazines, pos- sense, he is an intellectual from Argentina, and I don’t Just imagine: the vicissitudes of political power, the ters “panels,” the comic strip, etc.).3 know if you know this theory in biology where they say circular succession of economic teams. And what of Swedish City that the individual, that the ontogenesis recapitulates the ridiculous seizing of the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Information is the new material of dematerialized art. We the phylogenesis. (…) The idea that the development Islands) by an ex-actress and a few young extremists? could marvel at the prophetic qualities of this paragraph, both of a single individual recapitulates all the stages of I would say the answer is nothing. Especially if the in its anticipation of the immediate future (the Tucumán Arde Dora García development of the species. So when you’re a child point is to make comparisons: Argentina’s domestic project in 1968, for example),4 and in the long term (today, you’re a sort of amphibious, and when you grow up and foreign politics are no less serious and more scan- information is the ultimate currency, the supreme power). you’re traversing all the stages of the species, is it dalous, nor more serious and less scandalous (per- But we must not fail to appreciate what such a claim meant clear? haps less scandalous) than those of any other Western for an Argentinian intellectual. In a recent interview with Nina nation. On the other hand, it would be di cult for Argen- Möntmann, Lucy Lippard says: Adva Zakai: Yes, yes. tines to give ourselves the politics we want. The iron limits of an internal and external economic and social I’ve often pondered why artists in more volatile or “We had the experience but missed the meaning, Gabriel Catren: So in a sense Masotta is someone who, structure determine and decide for us, and without our totalitarian societies (Chile in 1973, or Central America And approach to the meaning restores the experience.” in his ontogenesis, in his development as a person, input, a “reality” that is only ours because it is alien.2 around 1980, are among the chilling examples) were – T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” recapitulates many of the different stages of the Euro- perceived by their rightwing governments as real thre- pean intelligentsia during the last century. He started Masotta was keenly aware of the circumstances (we could ats, whereas we who were analyzing activism, making with phenomenology, then he passed to existentialism, say: the miseries) of the Argentinian intellectual. He defined art by “desecrating” American flags, or yelling and Ricardo Piglia uses these lines from T. S. Eliot as the epigram afterwards to Marxism (well, not afterwards, they were the political attitude of his younger years with the formula: wheatpasting on the streets of New York with similar to his novel Artificial Respiration, published in 1981. I start my all entangled), after that he was a structuralist, and anti-anti-Peronism. A complex position, difficult to under- politics were just nuisances to the US government, a introduction to the first Cahier of this series of publications afterwards he was interested in psychoanalysis. So stand for those not versed in the shifts and turns of Argentinian dispiriting sign of art’s direct ineffectiveness.5 about and around the work of Oscar Masotta by relating the a single individual traversed, recapitulated, all these politics from the 1950s to the 1970s: an opposition to those story of the first time I met Ricardo Piglia, in Buenos Aires, in stages of thinking in Europe in the last century. who oppose Peronism that is at the same time not an endor- Indeed, the practice of dematerializing art (and the relation of 2014. It was as part of a public discussion, in the course of sement of Peronism. In Masotta’s later years, lived mostly in that practice to art’s politization) in the South American con- which I read a passage from Artificial Respiration, and Piglia That is, indeed, what makes Masotta so interesting: he is a exile, this was replaced by a sense of hopelessness about the text between 1966 and 1972 could be fatal, literally. It wasn’t didn’t immediately recognize that the passage I was reading man who recapitulates–a man whose work embodies and political situation in Argentina. The Ezeiza massacre of June necessary to be an artist whose work was explicitly politi- was from his book. Piglia constructs his novel around the traverses–the seminal currents and tensions of intellectual 20, 1973, put an end to the hope that a decent political regime cal in content to enter the area of danger. One didn’t have idea–obviously a metaphor for the act of reading itself–of and political debate in Europe during his century. That said, could be established there, and triggered the massive exile of to be a pamphleteer to draw the attention of government letters being intercepted by someone other than the addres- Masotta was Argentinean through and through, and in his intellectuals to Europe, and to Spain in particular, because of forces. A case in point are the repercussions that befell the see. That idea has been important for this project all along: writings he always insists, with bitter lucidity, on where he the common language. Masotta was one of many to escape, members of a psychoanalytical group in Argentina that was what are we, after all, if not clandestine readers, snoopers, is speaking from. In “I Committed a Happening,” for exam- first to London, then to Barcelona. half-jokingly called Lacano Americanos: many of its members into the correspondence between Masotta and his time? ple, he writes: The years of dematerialization go from 1966, when participated in Masotta’s happenistas adventures, and most And it is central to this Cahier, which presents newly-found Masotta “committed” his happenings, to 1972, the year of either preceded or followed him into exile. For Masotta, to letters that Masotta wrote to his mother in Buenos Aires from I was thinking of accomplishing purely aesthetic ends, the Trelew Massacre (when sixteen political prisoners were be a politically-aware author could not be dissociated from his voluntary exile in Barcelona in the last years of his life. and I imagined myself a bit like the director of the executed by Argentina’s military government), and of the being, radically, an avant-gardist. And avant-gardism in the Masotta’s daughter Cloe, who has been a collaborator in this Museum in Stockholm, who had opened himself up, approval of Law 19,797, which forbade the dissemination of time of dematerialization, Masotta argues, “fuses” content project more or less from the start, found them only last year from within an official institution, to all manner of avant- any information concerning guerrilla organizations in Argen- and form/medium, and in so doing it deactivates the tradi- and she suggested that we could use them, an idea that we garde manifestations. But Buenos Aires is not a Swe- tina. Like Lucy Lippard (see Six Years: The Dematerialization tional, conventional opposition between these two terms. immediately agreed to, not just because of the insight they dish city. At the moment during which we planned of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972), Masotta saw demateri- Masotta writes: give into Masotta as a father, husband, and son, but also the two-week festival there came the coup d’état that alization (the abandonment of the materiality of the object in because of the plastic possibilities they offer for this Cahier. brought Juan Carlos Onganía to power, and there favor of its conceptuality) as a consequence of the politization And if there is talk now of not concerning oneself The discovery of these letters gives us a fresh and was an outburst of puritanism and police persecution. of art. The idea, in broad strokes, is that the liberalization of with content, it does not mean that avant-garde art is unique glimpse into the private temperament of an inten- Scared, we abandoned the project: what is more, it the art object from materiality meant both its democratization moving toward a new purism or a worse formalism. sely curious and intellectually voracious character. There is was a bit embarrassing, amid the gravity of the poli- and the displacement of the dialectic, content/form, towards What is occurring today in the best pieces is that the nothing in them about his intellectual production (other than tical situation, to be creating Happenings….