Untitled, 1962 207

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation interrogates how the Caracas-based collective El Techo de la

Ballena (active 1961−69) vacillated between the sociopolitical concerns that provided the basis for its proposals and the wide array of mainstream tendencies that informed its anti- aesthetic stances. El Techo dialogued with a variety of global currents in a multifaceted practice that encroached upon the realms of the aesthetic, the political, and the literary. In spite of evident convergences with au courant tendencies in these spheres, a fundamental retrograde stance anchored the proposals of these radicalized writers, artists, poets, and art critics. As I argue, their compulsion to return to the past reflected an aversion towards a critical Cold War moment marred in Venezuela by several key factors: a far from peaceful transition to democracy during the government of Rómulo Betancourt, a rapid physical transformation fueled by increasing oil revenue, persistent underdevelopment, and a less than equitable distribution of wealth.

In Part I, I establish the socioeconomic and cultural conditions upon which El

Techo based its multidisciplinary interventions. Two chapters investigate the critical issue of the Venezuelan petro-state at midcentury: the unbalance between a rapid officially- sanctioned socioeconomic development and the slower agricultural temporalities that continued to determine the rhythms of vast sectors of the population. I contend that the collective responded to the problems unleashed by a national economy built on petroleum and the parallel development of a fad aesthetic, Informalism, which emerged from the cultural excesses of that unstable developmentalist model. I organize Part II around three

case studies that closely examine El Techo’s deliberate inversion of an internationally

aligned modernity that hinged on the need for constant evolution and progress in the visual

arts. I maintain that the collective’s overarching interest in the retrograde was the chief

value that held its work together during the critical 1961 to 1964 period when it questioned

the weight of Informalism and in later years when it turned to an alternate political lineage in its proposals.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With the hindsight afforded by years of chipping away at this, there is no question

in my mind that a dissertation is, foremost, a collaborative effort. Mine would not have

been possible without the wise and at times also invaluable practical counsel of Thomas

Reese and Marilyn G. Miller of Tulane University and Fabiola López-Durán of Rice

University. I will be eternally grateful to them for their confidence in me and willingness

to support my work at critical moments during a process that began, it seems to me, an eternity ago.

In between a hurricane, a migration, the death of my mother, the birth of two sons, and the consequent tribulations that each of these life-changing events brought I held on to the hope of one day finishing this project. I wish to thank the many people who encouraged me and shared this dream. First, I would like to acknowledge my late mother, Flora Vales

Lecároz, and the pleasure that she would have taken in seeing this dissertation to its completion. Also, I must wholeheartedly thank that incredible network of extended family and friends that, over the years have sustained me in multiple ways, reassured me of my strengths, and loved me unconditionally. In the many years since I left Puerto Rico, they have often reminded me of where I come from, and most importantly uttered the deeply comforting words “tranquila que no estás sola” when I most needed to hear them. Among family members, I am referring to las Vales (that wonderfully complex kin of which I am so very proud to belong) and of course the rest of the Lecároz family, los Gaztambide (in

all of its ramifications), and los Busot (the family that I have chosen). I also wish to thank

the countless friends who have been patient with me and waited until I was able to, again,

speak my mind and literally write these words. You know who you are and I thank you from the bottom of my heart! Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t dully credit Isaac

Esparza for offering fundamental advice during the stages prior to writing the manuscript without which it would have been difficult to complete the dissertation.

There have also been a number of colleagues that have played an important role in

this dissertation. In Caracas I would like to thank Roldán Esteva Grillet, María Elena Huizi,

Josefina Manrique, and Tahía Rivero Ponte. Our mutual affinities over the years were

certainly at play in transforming early working relationships into lifelong friendships. But,

perhaps more importantly, their early advice, continued encouragement, help in locating

key sources and images for me, and building anticipation as I made progress, alerted me of

the responsibility that I carried with every chapter. It is for them and for so many other

Venezuelans engaged in daily struggles that I have approached this project with objectivity,

dignity, and respect.

Here in the United States, I would also like to thank several colleagues who offered

support and encouragement during those moments when I most needed reassurances. They

include Alejandro Anreus, Olga Herrera, Melina Kervandjian, Harper Montgomery,

Yasmín Ramirez, Víctor Sorell, as well as my New Orleans friends Pamela Franco,

Ludovico Feoli and Stephanie Stone, and Steve Clayton and the late William Perry

“Pepper” Brown, III. I cannot adequately express the gratitude that I feel for their many

individual acts of kindness, heartfelt encouragement, and even menial favors that have

enriched this project in multiple ways.

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In Houston, where I wrote this dissertation and I live and work, I also have many

people to thank. Foremost, I wish to recognize the generous mentorship of Mari Carmen

Ramírez through nearly ten years of collaboration at the Museum of Fine Arts. Certainly, her tradition of challenging entrenched representations of Latin America has transformed my own understanding of the region and its cultural production. Many other colleagues at the MFAH offered much support, but I am especially indebted to Jon Evans and Lynn

Wexler at the Hirsch Library, whose own curiosity about the balleneros was sparked by my project in the course of helping me track down obscure sources. I would also like to acknowledge Bonnie van Zoest, Nora Heymann, María McGreger, Beatriz Olivetti and the rest of the team at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). Their constant generosity and daily enthusiasm is also reflected in this project. I would also like to thank Scott W. Boehm for carefully helping me to polish the manuscript during its last stages.

After concluding the process that has been this dissertation, I am now firmly convinced that the universe has a very particular way of gifting you situations and people— living or living through their work, as in the case of El Techo—that hold keys for your own personal transformation. Regarding these collisions, and at the risk of entering into the realm of clichés, I have learned that the trick is to remain perceptive. On that note, my sincere appreciation and admiration is due to the balleneros, most of whom are now departed. The clarity of their pronouncements and steadfast posture reminded me in the difficult months that I spent writing this dissertation to stay true to my own beliefs. At that crossroads, their work reinforced something that I have always known but have not always had the courage to put into practice. I am referring to the importance of not allowing

iv anyone or anything placate one’s truth or curtail one’s spirit. I do hope that, moving forward, the same incorruptible human force that they empathized with and fervently defended in their work will animate my own route.

Finally, I wish to thank my two sons, Vincent and Federico Esparza, for challenging me and for compelling me to see life through different eyes. Vincent and Fede, even though you are only six and four years old as I write this, I have already learned much from you.

Vincent, your principled and disciplined nature challenges me to observe, to make that extra effort, and to persevere especially when others bet against you. Fede, your blend of gentle ways and rebellious spirit inspires me to look closely, to remain kind, and to recognize the beauty that is within our reach. Needless to say, without you in my life I would have abandoned this project long ago. It is to you, then, that I dedicate this dissertation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

LIST OF FIGURES viii

INTRODUCTION – Retrograde Modernity: The Deliberate Anachronism of El Techo de la Ballena 1

State of the Literature and Scope of Project 7 An Anti-Aesthetic Project 11 The Venezuelan “Make-Believe” 15 Upturned Modernity 20

PART I – The Venezuelan “Make-Believe”

CHAPTER ONE – The Site of Paradise 26

An Emerging (North American) Physiognomy of Modernity 29 The Two-Story Country: Oil as the Driving Force for Venezuelan Development 33 The Mirage of Progress 41 A Blinding Gesamtkunstwerk 48 The Undoing of Order 60

CHAPTER TWO – Betwixt and Between: Informalism and the Passage to Art Terrorism 68

The Precedents of Venezuelan Informalism 70 Interlude: El Paso’s Spanish Contrarianism 80 Climax: Taking Up Arms in Venezuela 88 Dénouement: Opening the Floodgates 97

PART II – Upturned Modernity

CHAPTER THREE –Why the Whale? 102

Kennings 105 Containment 107 Release 118

CHAPTER FOUR – The Authority of Kitsch 125

Domestic Radicalism 128 A Rhetorical Return to the Kitsch 132 Kitsch at the Gallery 136 An Aesthetic of Accumulation 142 Vernacular Happening 144

CHAPTER FIVE – Dead Matter for an Enlivened Practice 150

The Redemption of Dead Matter 153 Necrophilia 158 Unfolding the Prank 163 Hygienization 169

EPILOGUE – Slipping and Sliding 174

CONCLUSION – A Lexicon for El Techo de la Ballena 182

Lopsided Modernity 183 Contemporaneity as a Paradise Lost 184 A Contingent Milieu as the Whale 185 Fluidity as “the roof of the whale” 186 Art as a Total Enterprise 188

APPENDIX A – Figures 190

APPENDIX B – Biographical Sketches 254

APPENDIX C – Brief Chronology 284

BIBLIOGRAPHY 294

BIOGRAPHY 316

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1.1 a-d Stills from Pozo muerto, a documentary film by Edmundo 190 Aray, Antonio de la Rosa, and Carlos Rebolledo, 1967 1.2 Lawrence Beall Smith, Don’t let that shadow touch them: buy 191 war bonds, 1942 1.3 a-b Dr. Gonzalo Cárdenas Farías announcing grid of planned 191 railroad lines to connect Venezuela, c. 1951; and Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek announcing similar network of roads in Brazil, 1956 1.4 John F. Kennedy delivering a speech at La Morita, Venezuela, 192 during an official meeting for the Alliance for Progress in 1961 1.5 Map of Creole Petroleum oil camps in Venezuela, c. 1950s 192

1.6 Daniel González, “Una disyuntiva: la gastronomía o el 193 hambre,” c. 1960s 1.7 Aerial photography of Plaza Venezuela c. 1951 193

1.8 Paolo Gasparini, Bello Monte, Caracas, 1968 194

1.9 a-d Jorge Romero Gutierrez, Pedro Neuberger, and Dirk 194 Bornhorst, architects, various views of El Helicoide at Roca Tarpeya, Caracas 1.10 a-d Oscar Niemeyer, Plan for the unrealized Museo de Arte 195 Moderno de Caracas (MAMC), 1951 1.11 a-d Giὸ Ponti, Villa Planchart (Residence for Anala and Armando 195 Planchart), 1953−57 1.12 Lanthrop Douglass, Creole Petroleum building, 1947−54 196

1.13 a-b British Pathé News, stills from “Venezuela’s City of 196 Tomorrow” and “Venezuela’s ‘Utopia’ City,” both 1954 1.14 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Urbanización 23 de Enero, 1954−57 197

1.15 Edward Ward, The New El Dorado. Venezuela (cover), 1957 197

1.16 Daniel González, photograph from Asfalto-Infierno, 1963 198

1.17 Alejandro Otero, Cafetera Azul (First version), 1947 198

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1.18 Pascual Navarro, La muchacha de abanico, 1947 199

1.19 Jesús Rafael Soto, Boîte, 1955−64 199

1.20 Carlos Cruz-Diez, Construcción en el espacio, 1957 200

1.21 Woman manipulating the catalogue that Carlos Cruz-Diez 200 designed for the exhibition Mouvement 2, Galerie Denise René, 1964 1.22 a-b Catalogue and installation view of The Responsive Eye, 201 MoMA, 1965 1.23 a-c Carlos Raúl Villanueva, redevelopment of El Silencio 201 (1943−45), three views 1.24 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Aerial view of the Ciudad 202 Universitaria’s central axis 1.25 Francisco Narváez, La educación, 1950 202

1.26 Two examples of Villanueva’s use of reinforced concrete at 203 the Ciudad Universtaria 1.27 Mateo Manaure, mural for exterior of the covered plaza at the 203 Ciudad Universitaria 1.28 Alejandro Otero, decoration of the School of Engineering, 203 Ciudad Universitaria 1.29 Alexander Calder, Acoustic Clouds for the Aula Magna, 204 Ciudad Universitaria 1.30 Francisco Narváez, El Atleta, 1952 204

2.1 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (cover), MoMA, 205 1936 2.2 Jean Fautrier, Tête d’otage, 1944 205

2.3 Manuel Viola, Sierra Maestra, 1959 206

2.4 Catalogue for Espacios Vivientes, Palacio Municipal in 206 Maracaibo, February 14−28, 1960 2.5 Ángel Luque, Untitled, 1962 207

2.6 Gabriel Morera, Untitled (Cabezas Series), 1961 207

2.7 Jean Dubuffet, La Volonté de Puissance, 1946 208

2.8 Juan Calzadilla, Crónica de Caracas con cráneos de la 208 Digepol, 1965 2.9 Catalogue for Salón Experimental, Sala Eugenio Mendoza, 209 September 18−October 2, 1960

2.10 Sketch for the invitation to El Paso’s group show at the 209 Institución Fernando El Católico, Palacio Provincial, Zaragoza, January 20−February 20, 1958 2.11 Rafael Canogar, Untitled, ca. 1961 210

2.12 Manuel Rivera, Variaciones sobre un gris, 1958 210

2.13 Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Saturn Devouring His 211 Son, 1819–23 2.14 José Gutiérrez Solana, La procesión de la muerte, 1930 211

2.15 Installation shot of installation of Para la restitución del 212 magma, opened March 21, 1961 2.16 a-b El Techo de la Ballena, rayado sobre el techo no. 1, March 24, 213 1961 2.17 Fernando Irazábal, El occiso, c. 1960 214

2.18 Fernando Irazábal, El occiso, c. 1960 214

2.19 Catalogue for Bestias, occisos, exhibition by Fernando 215 Irazábal, Sala Mendoza, March 30−April 15, 1962 2.20 “Nuevos Cuadros Llevarán para Inuagurar esta Noche Galería 215 de Informalistas,” La Esfera, March 24, 1961 3.1 a-b Illustrations for Adriano González León’s “¿Por que la 216 ballena?” and Caupolicán Ovalles’ “Contraseñas,” both in rayado sobre el techo no. 3, August 1964 3.2 Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch, Sea-monsters and strange 216 animals that in the Midnight Lands are found in the sea and on land, 1550 3.3 Anonymous woodcut, Whale eating men, from Sebastian 217 Münster’s Cosmographia universalis, first edition 1544 3.4 a-b Detail from rayado sobre el techo no. 2, May 1963; and recto 217 of En uso de razón by Caupolicán Ovalles, July 1963 3.5 Wolfgang Kilian, St. Brendan’s whale, engraving for Honorius 218 Philiponus’ Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis, 1621 3.6 Invitation for the show Exposición tubular, Galería-Librería 218 Ulises, July 1963 3.7 Page from Salve, Amigo Salve, y Adiós, July 1968 219

3.8 Dámaso Ogaz, Esquema majamámico de uso profiláctico, 219 1967 3.9 Rodolfo Izaguirre receiving Ángel Luque’s original drawing 220 for the first rayado sobre el techo, c. 1961 3.10 a-b Daniél González, cover and back cover design for Caupolicán 220 Ovalles’ ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente?, May 1962

3.11 a-b Daniél González, cover and back matter design for Juan 221 Calzadilla’s Dictado por la jauría, October 1962 3.12 Daniel González, covers for Francisco Pérez Perdomo’s Los 221 Venenos Fieles, 1963; Daniel González and Adriano González León, Asfalto/Infierno, January 1963; and Edmundo Aray, Sube para Bajar, 1963 3.13 Pages six and seven of ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente?, 222 1962 3.14 Konrad Gerner, Fischbuch: Der zwölfte theil von de Meertheire, 222 folio 97r, 1598 or earlier 3.15 Detail from Olaus Magnus, Carta Marina, 1539 223

3.16 Four examples from the Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena 223 series, 1963−68 3.17 a-b Two interior details from Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los 224 venenos fieles, 1963 3.18 a-b Poster/catalogue for Alberto Brandt’s Falsarios eróticos, 224 Galería El Puente, October 20−November 10, 1966 3.19 Installation view of Tubulares, Galería-Librería Ulises, 1963 225

3.20 a-b Santiago “Chago” Armada, ¡Ay!, cartoon published in El 226 Techo’s postcard series from 1967; and Salomón, comic strip published in El humor otro, 1963 4.1 Entrance to El Techo de la Ballena’s gallery at El Conde 227 during the show Homenaje a la cursilería, opened May 7, 1961 4.2 Sofía [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena. Homenaje 228 a lo cursi,” May 21, 1961 4.3 [Alberto Brandt], [Establecer una frontera entre lo cursi y lo 229 pavoso...], typed manuscript handed out turing the opening of Homenaje a la cursilería, c. May 1961 4.4 Campaign poster for Rómulo Betancourt, c. 1958 230

4.5 Photograph reflecting signing of the Punto Fijo Pact, 1958 230

4.6 Manuel Cabré, La silla de Caracas, 1951 231

4.7 Pedro Centeno Vallenilla, María Lionza y las tres razas en la 231 Fuente, date unknown 4.8 Luis Alfredo López Méndez, Flores, 1947 232

4.9 Feler Voalois, installation shot of Homenaje a la cursilería, 232 May 1962 4.10 Feler Voalois, installation shot of Homenaje a la cursilería, 233 May 1962

4.11 Humberto Muñoz, cover for the satirical magazine El Gallo 233 Pelón, April 18, 1961 4.12 Ana Griselda Vega Albornoz, Miss Venezuela 1961 234

4.13 Cartilla cívica popular, early 1960s 234

4.14 a-c Irene Delano, Robert Gwathmey, and Edwin Rosskam, 235 silkscreen posters produced for Division of Film and Graphics in Puerto Rico, c. 1940s 4.15 a-b Fritz Melbye, Retrato del general José Antonio Páez, c. 1850s; 235 and Eloy Palacios, “Venezuelan Joropo,” 1912 4.16 Photograph of Rodolfo Izaguirre, Edmundo Aray, and Carlos 236 Contramaestre promoting Homenaje a la cursilería, May 1961 4.17 Feler Voalois, installation shot of Homenaje a la cursilería, 237 May 1962 4.18 Emiel van Moerkerken, exhibition view of the Exposition 237 Internationale du Surréalisme, January 17−February 24, 1938 4.19 Alfredo Boulton residence at Pampatar, Margarita 238

4.20 Feler Voalois, detail of netting used during Homenaje a la 239 cursilería, May 1962 4.21 John D. Schiff, Installation of First Papers of Surrealism 239 (South view), showing Marcel Duchamp’s His twine, 1942 4.22 a-b Two views of This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery 240 (London), August 9−September 9, 1956 4.23 John McHale, Machine-Made America II, collage, 1956 241

4.24 Daniel González, untitled collage from Daniel González 241 Collages, 40 Grados a la Sombra, January 31−February 16, 1964 5.1 a-c Daniel González, photographs from Asfalto-Infierno, 1963 242

5.2 Daniel González, “Terreno propio,” photograph from Asfalto- 242 Infierno, 1963 5.3 Daniel González, “Se venden vestidos para difuntas,” 243 photograph from Asfalto-Infierno, 1963 5.4 a-c Three exterior views of the opening for Homenaje a la 244 necrofilia, November 2, 1962 5.5 a-c Three installation views of Homenaje a la necrofilia during 245 opening night, November 2, 1962 5.6 Carlos Contramaestre, Estudio para verdugo y perro, 1962 246

5.7 Manolo Millares, Homúnculo, 1960 246

5.8 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Slaughtered Ox, 1655 247

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5.9 Francis Bacon, Figure with Meat, 1954 247

5.10 Carlos Alonso, Carne de primera, 1977 247

5.11 El Techo de la Ballena, catalogue for Carlos Contramaestre’s 248 Homenaje a la necrofilia, 1962 5.12 Jan Wandelaar, Human Skeleton with Young Rhinoceros, 1747 249

5.13 Ligier Richier, Transi de René de Châlon, Church of Saint- 249 Étienne, Bar-le-Duc, France, 1547 5.14 Carlos Contramaestre, Flora cadavérica from the Homenaje a 250 la necrofilia series, 1962 5.15 Daniel González, [Carlos Contramaestre]: “El artista en su 251 taller,” 1962 5.16 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes 251 Tulp, 1632 5.17 Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente [aka Hieronymous 252 Fabricius], page from Tabulae Pictae, first published in 1600 5.18 Carlos Contramaestre, Tres años más tarde, c. 1962 252

5.19 Detail from catalogue for Homenaje a la necrofilia, verso 253

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INTRODUCTION − RETROGRADE MODERNITY: THE DELIBERATE ANACHRONISM OF EL TECHO DE LA BALLENA

es necesario restituir el magma la material en ebullición la lujuria de la lava colocar una tela al pie de un volcán restituir el mundo … el informalismo … reubica [al magma] en la plena actividad del crear restablece categorías y relaciones que ya la ciencia presiente … el toque de una materia arbitraria que corre hasta los ojos más incrédulos es una posibilidad de creación tan evidente y tan real como la tierra y la piedra que configuran las montañas porque es necesario restituir el magma la material en ebullición la prótesis de adán.1

—El Techo de la Ballena, 1961

Walking down a dark Salamanca street in the late fifties, the Venezuelan students

Carlos Contramaestre (1933−96), Caupolicán Ovalles (1936−2001), and Alfonso Montilla paused for a moment at a crossing over which hung a plaque stating: “On this corner a man was killed. Pray for his soul.”2 Upon reading it, the trio erupted in song, bellowing the

All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

1 Here, as in other passages from El Techo’s writings, I retain the erratic spacing of the original publication. El Techo de la Ballena, “para la restitución del magma,” rayado sobre el techo: letras, humor, pintura (Caracas: Ediciones de El Techo de la Ballena) no. 1 (March 24 1961): n/p. ICAA Digital Archive no. 1142155.

2 “En esta esquina mataron a un hombre. Ruegen a Dios por él.” Edmunday Aray in in Sobre El Techo de la Ballena, documentary by G2. Grupo Creativo, directed by Luis Alejandro Rodríguez, produced by Humberto Galvis and Luis Chacón (release date unknown), multiple dates of access, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Ian7EnVpc.

irreverent hymn: “Birds, birds, fornicate in the Cathedral; [they] hurl their feathers against

the wind. Birds, birds, fornicate in the Cathedral.”3 With this proclamation, a late night of

youthful debauchery and excess in Spain was transformed into the foundational moment

for a group that, following Contramaestre’s and Ovalles’ return to Venezuela in 1961,

would eventually became known as El Techo de la Ballena (active 1961−69, hereafter El

Techo).

Sometime after that fateful night, in March 1961, the collective inaugurated their first exhibition titled Para la restitución del magma at the garage of a private house in the working-class Caracas suburb of El Conde (near Parque Central). Through the guise of a series of informalist canvases, El Techo issued a poignant commentary against what its members viewed as the spent Utopia of geometric-abstraction, clichéd genre painting, and

the depleted “cheap [social] realism” of “potbellied youths…or rifle carrying

revolutionaries.” The group also directed its critique to those excessively consecrated

artists who, in their opinion, lacked “investigative and experimental spirit.”4 Moreover,

this posture was a decree against the complicity of the Venezuelan political and cultural

establishments with these tendencies. Indeed, the exhibited works reflected a collective

disdain of an anesthetized local environment that, its members thought, required an outright

3 “Los pájaros, los pájaros, fornican en la catedral; lanzan sus plumas contra el viento. Los pájaros, los pájaros, fornican en la catedral.” Ibid.

4 Ángel Rama, “Prólogo,” Antología de “El Techo de la ballena” (Caracas: FUNDARTE, 1987), 11−37, 19. Based largely on the homonymous second section of the prologue to the Antología, the essay was later translated as “Of Terrorism in the Arts” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), 121−25, 123.

unsettling through what the ballenero artist and critic Juan Calzadilla (b. 1930) qualified

as “…scatological images... An interior reign of viscera… A biological art, violently

exuded from our bowels…”5 In this fundamental sense, Para la restitución del magma

highlighted the value of playful regression that permeated across the group’s oeuvre since

its inception. The exhibition illustrated the collective’s overarching interest in the

retrograde, which in the context of this study, I define as a return to an earlier and

potentially inferior condition. As applied here, the concept not merely invoked a contrarian

movement vis-à-vis the norm but also encompassed key aspects of the degenerate and the

abject, which are consistent with rare definitions for the term. As I argue, El Techo’s

“backwards” position became the basis for a disorderly project of grief that counteracted

the swiftness by which Venezuelan culture entered modernity.6

At the same time, Para la restitución del magma emblematized an integrated

approach to art-making that included artworks with multiple meanings, alternative

exhibition spaces, politicized actions, as well as highly confrontational printed materials.

In 2008, Calzadilla who along with artist and medical doctor Contramaestre has long been

considered the group’s chief ideologue, wrote that the outcome of the collaboration

between artists, poets, and art critics yielded radical results impossible to conceive had

5 “Imágenes escatológicas a la vista. Interioridad del reino de las vísceras o magia de las cortezas. Un arte biológico, orgánico, violentamente exudado de las entrañas, se pone en el plato de la balanza.” Juan Calzadilla, “Prólogo. Los años turbulentos,” in El Techo de la Ballena. 1961 Antología 1969, ed. Calzadilla, Israel Ortega Oropeza, and Daniel González (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 2008), xi−xxvi, xvi−xvii.

6 It is not by chance that the first encompassing exhibition to include El Techo in the United States was named Inverted Utopias. Curated by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston displayed a sample of their printed materials under the Play and Grief constellation of the exhibition. See note 4 of this Introduction for full citation.

each discipline continued independently.7 All these elements came together into a single, indivisible body of work that was similar, in its all-encompassing dimension, to the notion of “Intermedia” proposed by Fluxus poet and artist Dick Higgins (1938−98) several years later.8 Calzadilla stressed with regard to Para la restitución del magma that

In 1961, in Caracas, El Techo de la Ballena’s [garage] substituted well- appointed galleries [as an activated space],…more than a proclamation, its rant [became] a manifesto assuming the day-to-day as an explosive language. It was a poet’s interpretation of an informalist anti-aesthetic…9

Always challenging the establishment, the group’s germinal show set the tone for more than a dozen similar proto-conceptual actions.

The sheer variety of the issues to which El Techo directed its mordant critique provided fertile grounding for its heterogeneity. Key figures were Calzadilla,

7 Ibid., xxv−xxvi.

8 Dick Higgins, Fluxus’ principal theoretician, wrote that the Intermedial presupposed that artists could change their preferred media to suit the situation, “to the point where the media have broken down in their traditional forms, and have become merely puristic points of reference.” With repeated occurrences, these new genres between genres could develop their own names (e.g. visual poetry or performance art). On the emergence of an intermedial approach emphasizing the dialectic and the blurring of the lines between formal media, he stated: “The idea has arisen,…, that these points are arbitrary and only useful as critical tools, in saying that such-and-such a work is basically musical, but also poetry…the central problem is now not only the new formal one of learning to use [this total media], but the new and more social one of what to use them for?” Dick Higgins, “Statement of Intermedia,” [August 3, 1966], in Dé-coll/age (décollage), ed. Wolf Vostell, no. 6 (Frankfurt: Typos Verlag/New York: Something Else Press, July 1967). See also “Intermedia,” the something else NEWSLETTER (New York) 1, no. 1 (February, 1966), [1−3]. For an insightful reading of Fluxus’s relationship to modernism according to the terms of “intermedia” and “rear- guard,” see: Natilee Harren, “The Crux of Fluxus: Intermedia, Rear-guard,” in Art Expanded, 1958-1978, ed. Eric Crosby with Liz Glass, Vol. 2 of Living Collections Catalogue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), accessed April 17, 2015, http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/art-expanded/crux-of-fluxus.

9 “En Caracas, en 1961, El Techo de la Ballena arroja su modalidad de garaje como continente expositivo para sustituir a las galerías bien atendidas, su grito tiene más forma de estertor que de proclama, especie de manifiesto para asumir lo cotidiano con un lenguaje explosivo. Es la antiestética informalista bajo la lente del poeta, que no quiere firmar con la realidad un pacto de no agresión.” Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, xvii.

Contramaestre, Ovalles, the writers Edmundo Aray (b. 1936), Salvador Garmendia

(1928−2001), Adriano González León (1931−2008), Francisco Pérez Perdomo

(1930−2013), photographer Daniel González (b. 1934), and after 1967 also the Chilean- born poet and mail artist Dámaso Ogaz (1924−90). The activities of this inner circle were complemented by a network of frequent local collaborators that, at times, included the painters Hugo Baptista (b. 1935), Alberto Brandt (1924−70), Pedro Briceño (b. 1931),

Perán Erminy (b. 1929), Fernando Irazábal (b. 1936), Ángel Luque (b. Córdoba, Spain,

1927), Gabriel Morera (b. Madrid, 1933), and Manuel Quintana Castillo (b. 1928); writers

Gonzalo Castellanos (dates unknown), Mary Ferrero [de González León] (b. Argentina,

?−2003), Efraín Hurtado (1935−78), and Rodolfo Izaguirre (b. 1931);10 as well as the artist and archaeologist José María Cruxent (b. Barcelona, Spain, 1911−2005).11 Additionally,

El Techo had an impressive roster of international sympathizers.12

10 Other collaborators in Venezuela included David Alizo, Amanda Arreaza de Calzadilla, Jacobo Borges, Rafael Cadenas (from the magazine Tabla Redonda), Carlos Castillo, Alfredo Chacón, Eleazar Díaz Rangel, Xavier Domingo, the Italian photographer Paolo Gasparini, artist Elsa Gramcko, Marcia Leyseca, Los Disidentes painter Mateo Manaure, Antonio Mora, Darío Morales, Humberto Peña, Rogelio Perdomo, Régulo Pérez, Rodolfo Quintero, Ángel Rama, Renato Rodríguez, Tancredo Romero, Antonio de la Rosa, Ezequiel Saad, and Héctor Silva Michelena. See Appendix C for the trajectories of the most active of these local adherents and collaborators.

11 José María Cruxent was pivotal in establishing the link to scientific archeology and to the study of the Venezuelan pre-Columbian and colonial past. He had trained as an archaeologist in Barcelona before immigrating to Venezuela in 1939. There he made important advances to the field: from 1944 to 1963, Cruxent directed and was the chief archaeology conservator at the Museo de Ciencias de Caracas; from 1944 onward, he published on speleological archeology in a number of important journals; in 1953 he established Venezuela’s first archaeology program at the Facultad de Antropología y Sociología of the UCV; and, with longtime collaborator Irving Rouse, published such foundational texts as An Archeological Chronology of Venezuela, No. 6 of Social Science Monographs (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1958−59), and Venezuelan Archaeology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

12 Among them were: the Argentinean poets Juan Antonio Vasco and Oliverio Girondo, Colombian artists Carlos Granada and Augusto Rendón, as well as painter Pedro Alcántara, writer Henry Miller and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the United States, the Chilean artist Roberto Matta Echauren, Jorge Camacho and Roberto Fernández Retamar from Cuba, French film director Alain Resnais and the cartoonist Siné,

El Techo’s general proposals challenged the longstanding view assuming Latin

America’s combative artists exclusively adhered to styles that went against the grain. In

other words, that these artists’ work eschewed the international tendencies prized in the

continent’s various art Meccas (New York, certainly, but also Buenos Aires, Caracas, and

São Paulo).13 Contrary to this view, El Techo’s effervescent group of intellectuals (writers, artists, poets, and art critics) confronted a variety of international currents in a multifaceted practice that overtly encroached upon the realms of the aesthetic, the political, and the literary under the motto of “cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad” [to change life, to transform society]. However, in spite of evident convergences with au courant fads in these spheres, El Techo’s multidisciplinary oeuvre rested on a coherent principle of retrogression. As I argue in this dissertation, its extreme compulsion to return to a less developed and inferior past reflected an aversion towards a critical Cold War moment marred in Venezuela by several key factors: a far from peaceful transition to democracy after a legacy of ongoing military rule, a rapid physical transformation fueled by increasing oil revenue, persistent underdevelopment, as well as concentrated newfound wealth.

German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, and the Uruguayans Mario Handler, filmmaker, and Juan Carlos Onetti, novelist.

13 Already by the late sixties, Marta Traba denounced a Latin American compulsion to keep up with the burgeoning global art circuit that placed artists at odds with expressing any sort of regional specificity in their work. The critic—who was the first to elaborate an encompassing critical framework that considered Latin America as a cultural bloc—, felt that the desire to participate in the coordinated prizes, fairs, and competitions that comprised the international art system of the sixties, suggested to Latin American artists a flawed operative model consisting of the opposing poles of universalism and provincialism. In this model, a homogenizing “universal” aesthetic became the aspiration and any sort of national specificity was construed as “provincial” and thereby deficient vis-à-vis this international referent. See, for example, Traba’s key texts from this period: Arte latinoamericano actual (Caracas: Ediciones de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1972); and Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950−1970 (1973; reprint, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2005).

Perhaps the fundamental contradiction at stake here is that El Techo executed an

estrangement from Western cultural values and socioeconomic systems exacerbated in

Venezuela through means that remained inexorably linked to international modern art.

State of the Literature and Scope of Project

There are few critical studies of El Techo de la Ballena. Previous scholarship has

approached the collective only cursorily, often in an anecdotal manner, and frequently from the disciplinary lenses of literature and political science. Although extremely useful in the absence of a substantial body of knowledge on the group, even the groundbreaking work of the late Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama (1926−83) reflects this fixed approach.

Rama, who was the first to provide a critical framework in his posthumous Antología de

“El Techo de la ballena” of 1987, read El Techo’s production as a reflection of the socio-

political context of that violent period beginning in 1958 when Venezuela transitioned into

democracy following Rómulo Betancourt’s (1908−81) election. In his view, the group

challenged the terms of a failing developmental project in Venezuela through revolutionary

means borrowed from political activism to expose the depths of an inequality hidden within

the façade of the country’s flawed structural modernization. Rama was also the first to

define critically its practice as “art terrorism.” He arrived at such a characterization

following pronouncements issued by Adriano González León and Carlos Contramaestre

who, in separate instances, labeled their work as “subversive,” “polemical,” or

“terroristic.”14 Certainly, the group’s contentious praxis was part of a larger political process that “focused on the turbulence of life,” which in Venezuela was tainted by “an aggressiveness unheard of in the rest of Latin America.”15 But, in many respects Venezuela was not just any Latin American country: unfurled to the sea, it was both a borderland and a Caribbean enclave on South America’s northern coast. As such, it was perhaps the Latin

American country that most resolutely embraced Cuba’s revolutionary energies at this time. Yet, El Techo’s politicized breach was not just about politics, as Rama asserted in precursory texts from 1966 and 1974.16

14 Regarding the false positivity of the world surrounding El Techo in Venezuela, the idea of “terrorism” must be understood as a fruitful or bountiful assumption of negativity. In 1964, González León wrote: “Sobre la superficie, en la huella de esa peripecia, está ardiendo aún la mecha de un dispositivo polémico, colocado a veces con métodos terroristas, como jamás se había hecho en la pacífica y respetuosa fábrica de nuestras artes y nuestra literatura.” González León, “¿Por qué la ballena?,” 3. “Poesía de acción,” Edmundo Aray had called it. See: Rama, “Prólogo,” 15. Years later, Contramaestre credited Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888−1963) with having suggested to him the notion of art terrorism. Of the latter’s Ismos (1947), the artist-physician recalled: “Esta publicación influyó mucho en nosotros al informarnos sobre la transformación radical de lo que se podía llamar un arte subversivo de aquellos años (me refiero al Surrealismo, dadaísmo, orfismo, etc.). Al final el libro cuenta con una especie de ensayo que se centra en una praxis terrorista de la literatura y daba una especie de modo de comportamiento del artista terrorista. Por supuesto, se trataba de un terrorismo intelectual, concebido para un medio como el español, donde era muy difícil conmover a una población adormecida por tanto tiempo de banalidad. En fin, este libro nos dio una pauta para lo que después quisimos hacer.” Contramaestre in Carmen Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad en Venezuela: arte y literatura en El Techo de la Ballena ([Mérida, Venezuela]: Casa de las Letras “Mariano Picón Salas,” Consejo de Desarrollo Científico, Humanístico y Tecnológico/CDCHT-ULA, 1997), 137−39. Although there is no final section outlining a terrorist practice as Contramaestre states, on several of the essays in Ismos Gómez de la Serna does address aspects of this notion. For example, on the Surrealists he wrote: “Son artistas que están dispuestos a la cárcel y al martirio y que quieren hacer la revolución desde la interferencia de la poesía, como un milagro del arte, como un soplo sutil y misterioso.” On the terrorist stance of the Comte de Lautréamont [Isidore Ducasse], he stated: “…tiene su obra una cosa sagrada, ímproba, de rebelión sensata, de rebelión por el insulto, que le hace parecer el segundo redentor que aún está en los infiernos.” See: Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Ísmos (1943; reprint, Buenos Aires: Editorial Poseidón, 1947), 285−86, 412.

15 Rama, “Prólogo,” 19.

16 See, by Rama: “Sobre el techo de la ballena,” Marcha (Montevideo) XXVII, no. 1,307 (June 10, 1966): 30−31; and “El Techo de la Ballena,” La Vida Literaria. Revista de la Asociación de Escritores Mexicanos (Mexico City) nos. 8 and 9 (March-April 1974).

In more recent years, the Spanish philologist Héctor Brioso Santos revised Rama’s

work by introducing a wider array of perspectives ranging from psychoanalysis to

philosophy; yet his reading of key ballenero texts presupposed that the work was almost exclusively literary.17 His approach disregarded the group’s own key tenet to “restitute

magma,” which required it to aim its focus well beyond the limits of literature. Similarly,

Venezuelan and Latin American art historical narratives have also failed to consider the multidisciplinarity of El Techo’s production. With few exceptions, existing studies do not emphasize the group’s persistent interest in engaging a gamut of international aesthetic languages whose readings and interpretations have become more complex with the passage

of time.18

Without negating the evident links that existed between El Techo’s literary and

artistic output, this is the first focused study on the group’s amalgamated and all-

encompassing visual arts production. Drawing from extant El Techo writings and

ephemera, critical responses to its multifaceted work, press coverage as well as interviews,

this study seeks to illuminate the group’s vacillations (its eternal paradox) between the sociopolitical concerns that provided the basis for its production and the wide array of mainstream movements that informed its anti-aesthetic stance. I understand this

17 Héctor Brioso Santos, Estridencia e ironía. El Techo de la Ballena: un grupo de vanguardia venezolano (1961-69) (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla Secretario de Publicaciones, 2002).

18 In 2005, Lisa Blackmore completed a MA dissertation at the University of London that employed a more encompassing multidisciplinary reading of the group. However, her study focused exclusively on just one of the group’s many publications: Asfalto-Infierno by Daniel González and Adriano González León (1963). Useful as it is for understanding this fundamental publication, her work did not fully delve into the realm of art. Lisa Blackmore, “El Techo de la Ballena and Asfalto-Infierno: the Logic of Inversion in an Attack on Venezuela’s Cultural Establishment” (MA diss., University of London/Birbeck, 2005).

fundamental notion as an artistic praxis that confronted the established signposts of order to reveal chaos (the absence of order) and disorder as the basis for art’s vital structure.19

Three fundamental historiographical questions anchor this project. First, to what extent was El Techo local? We know that the idea for the collective originated in

Salamanca, Spain, but coalesced in Venezuela in order to address localized problems. Yet, its broad range of foreign sources, the personal histories of its key protagonists, its vast network of collaborators, and the group’s supra-national ambitions for its publications reflected a much more open network of global contacts than what has been recognized to date. Second, how do we define El Techo’s engagement with European and North

American avant-gardes? In other words, to what proportion did its collective work rest on a different social and institutional rationale vis-à-vis the international mainstream of the sixties and its Venezuelan corollary? Much has been said of how an initial generation of

Latin American conceptual artists who came of age in the seventies—including Víctor

Grippo (Argentina, 1936−2002), Luis Camnitzer (Uruguay, b. 1937), Cildo Meireles

(Brazil, b. 1948), Eugenio Dittborn (Chile, b. 1943) and Gonzalo Díaz (Chile, b. 1947)— merged sociopolitical concerns with avant-garde tendencies. Yet, there has been little mention of how El Techo anticipated by at least a decade in certain cases this strain of production, which the Spanish art critic Simón Marchán Fiz termed “ideological

19 The Argentinean artist Luis Felipe Noé (b. 1933) wrote that in a society in dynamic flux, as in in the postwar period, the choice was either to embrace disorder and chaos as an ordering system or to challenge the terms of a retour à l'ordre based on anachronistic values, which was the contestational route that El Techo embarked on. Luis Felipe Noé, Antiestética (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Van Riel, 1965).

conceptualism.”20 That is to say, the group’s role as an antecedent of this line of work

remains unrecognized or undervalued in most narratives of Venezuelan and Latin

American art of the twentieth century. Finally, how did El Techo’s work eschew the conflicts that arose between the structural underdevelopment they aimed to reveal and even denounce and its au courant art thinking and aesthetic choices? In other words, what did the obvious anachronism of its off-centered subject matter and techniques bring to the fore regarding its retrograde modernity?

An Anti-Aesthetic Project

El Techo’s persistent engagement with the trajectories of modern art is not well understood. Adriano González León wrote in 1964 of the hope to reconcile the Venezuelan condition—“disheveled and imprecise, perhaps, but full of the courage needed to assert itself”—with an investigation of contemporaneous international aesthetic currents. “The working methods, the expansion of borders, and the vigorous endeavors implemented in different latitudes,” he underscored, “provide us…with a wide field of research in which things can be accepted or rejected according to our own demands.”21 In the early sixties,

20 Simón Marchán Fiz and Mari Carmen Ramírez have rightfully differentiated these artist’s inherently political and social production from the rigidity and self-referentiality of the analytical model of Conceptualism preferred by their North American and European counterparts. See: Simón Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte de concepto (1960-1974). Epílogo sobre la sensibilidad ‘postmoderna’. Antología de escritos y manifiestos (1972; reprint, Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 1988), 268–271; and Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Blue Print Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, ed. Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht and Elizabeth Ferrer (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1993), 156−67.

21 “[El Techo de la Ballena] igualmente advierte que en toda la estructura y el andamiaje priva una circunstancia venezolana, desmelenada, imprecisa acaso, pero provista del coraje requerido en la necesidad de afirmarse. Acá, por especiales razones, como en toda América Latina, nada de lo que en letras y artes nuevos se ha realizado nos puede ser extraño. Los métodos de trabajo, la ampliación de fronteras, las

El Techo developed painterly and process-based practices culminating in production that resonated with the “dematerialized,” or perhaps better stated as “re-materialized,” open forms of Informalism. 22 This postwar movement encompassed many of the predominantly

European gestural trends that developed concurrent to North American Abstract

Expressionism.23 But, as a group, El Techo often incorporated objects culled from the everyday in art proposals that reflected the legacy of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and Dada. Moreover, as collaborations became

vigorosas empresas cumplidas en otras latitudes, nos prestan, como en la ciencia o la política, un amplio escenario de investigación, en el cual se cumplan afirmaciones o rechazos de acuerdo con nuestras e[x]igencias [sic]. Ponerse de espaldas es pura y simplemente jugar al avestruz. Entrar con nuestros propios ropajes, para vigorizarnos, en la gran ola universal, es dotar a nuestra condición de artistas y escritores de la única veta que puede provocar la trascendencia: saberse cultivadores de una nueva tierra, con hojas y frutos venenosos o insólitos, pero no ya un producto servil de imitadores de huertos bien cuidados en Europa…” Adriano González León, “¿Por qué la ballena?,” rayado sobre el techo (Caracas) no. 3 (August 1964): 2−5. Coll. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, El Techo de la Ballena/Ignacio and Valentina Oberto Collection [hereafter Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto] (object 22, box 3). Reprinted in Rama, Antología, 200−03. Translated as “Why the Whale?” in Boulton and his Contemporaries. Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan Art, 1912-1974, ed. Ariel Jiménez (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 265−67, 269.

22 Although the term “dematerialization,” as coined by North American critic and activist Lucy R. Lippard in 1968, has often been used to describe Informalism it may be, in fact, antithetical to the movement’s inherent will to accumulate materials, textures, and volumes. Lippard’s original notion described the “progressive obsolesce” of the art object and its projection unto the realm of pure ideas or spontaneous actions. Five years later she recognized the impossibility of such a conceit arguing, instead, that the projected displacement had never occurred. See: Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Art International XII (February 1968): 31−36, 31; and, for her recanting, see Postface to Six Years: The dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1973), 263−64. Perhaps a better option for framing Informalism may be Mari Carmen Ramírez’s idea of re-materialization. Writing from Latin America, in 1996 the Puerto Rican curator called attention to what she described as a “watershed of fin-de-siècle mannerisms” comprised of the recapturing of canonical art and their deliberate reinstatement into “a multiplicity of forms and stylistic revivals (neo-expressionism, trans-avant-garde, neo- conceptual, etc.).” See: Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Re-materialização/Re-materialization,” in Catálogo Geral da XXIII Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1996), 178−89, 178. ICAA Digital Archive no. 1111101.

23 Although there have been many attempts to arrive at a formal definition of Informalism, here I adopt the one proposed by Hal Foster, Rosalind Kraus, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s entry for art informel in their Art Since 1900 (2004): “a post-Cubist pictorial [and to a lesser degree, also sculptural] mode in which the figures, abstract or not, were not readily legible but would gradually emerge from a tangle of gestures or accumulation of matter before the consciousness of the spectator.” See: Hal Foster, Rosalind Kraus, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 682.

increasingly more multidisciplinary, its provocative actions, ephemeral gestures, radical stance, itinerant exhibition spaces, and publications that blurred the lines between word and image resonated with the production of kindred sixties movements such as the

Situationist International (SI, 1957−72), Fluxus (established circa 1961−62 as a loose network of international practitioners), and the London-based Independent Group (IG,

1952−55). These links and contacts with a much more open global artistic circuit remain, in many senses, implicit or unexamined.

What is perhaps most fascinating about El Techo is that despite evident structural affinities, there was a fundamental characteristic that set it apart from these international groups of the sixties avant-garde. Most notably, the Venezuelan collective very markedly sought to distance itself from the vertiginous rhythms and futuristic orientation that characterized the global scene of their time. In this sense, its members’ crowning concern was not to surpass in merits or innovations historical antecedents or to suggest a perception of an ongoing evolution in the field of modern art. Rather, their work spoke of the strongly felt “need” for a drastic detachment from modernity manifested through a repertoire of imagery culled from Venezuela’s colonial print culture as well as through the metaphorical invocation of much more abstract primeval history. More so than its international counterparts, with the exception of Fluxus which also issued pronouncements against “the art world’s capital-driven obsession with avant-gardist innovation,” El Techo’s production hinged upon a paradoxical turn towards the past in shaping proposals focused on the future.24 However, unlike Fluxus whose critical gaze was international in scope, the group

24 Harren, “The Crux of Fluxus,” n/p.

remained firmly grounded in conditions associated with Venezuela’s problematic sociopolitical conditions at midcentury.25

Venezuela’s fast-tracked tactics for entering and consuming modernity depended not only on its ferocious will to acquire the commodities and emblems of international modernism but also on the United States’ capacity to sell all these under the guise of both altruistic technical modernization and generous international cooperation. Certainly, the unstable aspects of this commercial relationship put the triad of social and economic modernization, experiential modernity, and cultural modernism to a test.26 The country possessed the economic means to import both modernization (in the sense of material and

technological progress) and modernism (its cultural production), which should not be

25 My approach contributes directly to an emerging body of scholarship questioning the supposedly linear progression of modernity by calling attention to key midcentury artists and intellectuals for whom a radical and concerted return to the past was often the basis for their proposals. Art historian Ralph Ubl, for example, recently published an insightful study on Max Ernst and the asynchronous character of his production during the post–World War I decades. Ubl investigated, precisely, how during this critical period, Ernst’s work reflected an aversion towards the accelerated rate at which information was transferred and the speed at which living culture became a cast-off of history. Ralph Ubl, Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting Between the Wars, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). The Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas (1911−69) undertook a similar approach in his ferocious critiques against capitalism and modernity by offering pre-Columbian and colonial culture—Latin America’s archaic traditions, in his view—as his very particular pièce de résistance. See, for example, Mario Vargas Llosa, La utopía arcaica: José María Arguedas y las ficciones del indigenismo (1978; reprint Madrid: Alfaguara, 2008) or Ángel Rama’s numerous essays on Arguedas himself, including the relevant sections of Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982).

26 The conflicting relationship between these overlapping concepts was clarified by the North American philosopher Marshall Berman (1940−2013) in his book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1971−81, published, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). Berman built on Charles Baudelaire’s (1821−67) understanding of modernity as the public experience played out in a new shared and artificial Parisian space where people from all social classes converged following France’s economic modernization. By extension, modernism became the cultural record of the manner in which life was played out in that new setting. Yet, as Perry Anderson (b. 1938) critiqued in his hallmark 1984 essay “Modernity and Revolution,” an underlying flaw in Berman’s model resided in the assumed linear and homogeneous progression of these related notions. See: Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” reprinted in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (1863; reprint New York: Viking Press, 1972), 395−422; and Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review vol. I, no. 144 (March-April 1984): 96−113.

confused with the nineteenth-century Latin American literary current of modernismo.27

Yet, the exacerbated rate at which modernization and modernism where introduced stymied the natural progression of modernity as the historical experience linking these two phenomena. As an imported product, Venezuelan modernity lacked the density that characterized the modern era in Europe and in the United States. The result in Venezuela was an incomplete social project and a partial adoption of the lifestyle changes that accompanied industrialization, urbanization, and technical progress elsewhere.

Significantly, that part that was modernized in Venezuela was naively confused with the national whole. El Techo called into question this problematic paradox by anchoring its multidisciplinary projects within the tensions resulting from the country’s aspirational modernity and the disastrous social consequences of its economic modernization.

The Venezuelan ‘Make-Believe’

The first part of the dissertation is comprised of two chapters where I establish the socioeconomic and cultural conditions upon which El Techo based its multidisciplinary interventions beginning with the exhibition Para la restitución del magma in 1961. I posit that the critical issue of the Venezuelan petro-state of the fifties and sixties was the advent of unbalanced paradigm that tethered between the rapid (officially-sanctioned)

27 Modernismo refers to a literary current that emerged between 1880 and 1910 when writers including José Martí (1853−95) and Rubén Darío (1867−1916) sought to revivify Latin American literary life by infusing the outdated values associated with Spanish Castilian literature with ideas that could better articulate a regional voice. On its development, see: Alberto Julián Pérez, Modernidad, vanguardias, posmodernidad: Ensayos de literatura hispanoamericana (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 1995), 45−49.

socioeconomic development and the slower agricultural temporalities that continued to

determine the rhythms of vast sectors of the population. I argue in chapters 1 and 2 that El

Techo responded to the problems unleashed by a national economy built on a single

commodity, petroleum. Oil allowed for the construction (or rather, importation) of an

unsound notion of modernity that spurred the consequential development of an aesthetic movement, Informalism, which emerged from the excesses of an unstable economic model.

To wit, both chapters represent complementary sides of the same debate on capitalism as an overwhelming imposition in Venezuela during the sixties.

I anchor these chapters in the writings of the late Venezuelan anthropologist

Fernando Coronil (1944−2011) and the telenovela pioneer turned political commentator

José Ignacio Cabrujas (1937−95). I argue that the modernizing process in Venezuela depended on an outward two-step projection of order/rationality + progress/modernization that required the importation of mainstay architectural and aesthetic models. Newfound wealth hastened what Coronil, borrowing from Cabrujas, referred to as the Venezuelan

“make-believe,” a fundamental notion for understanding the country. In the late eighties,

Cabrujas observed that with the professionalization of the oil industry in earlier decades the wealth that it generated had the power of a myth. Venezuela experienced a rapid development that obscured the realities of a largely agrarian nation whose modernization was artificially fed by petrodollars:

With the development of the oil industry a cosmogony was created in Venezuela…From a slow evolution, as slow as everything that is related to agriculture, the state underwent a ‘miraculous’ and spectacular development…Oil is fantastic and induces fantasies. The announcement that Venezuela was an oil country created the illusion of a miracle; it

created, in practice, a culture of miracles…Oil wealth had the power of a myth.28

Certainly Cabrujas and Coronil would agree that the country’s formula for petro- development rested on the articulation of an alternate set of national mythologies that held together a homogenizing discourse of progress. By enjoining the multiple powers of the nation’s two bodies—a political body made up of its citizens and a natural body made up of its rich subsoil—the oil-producing State transformed itself into a single entity capable of recasting the nation.

Venezuela thus became a “magnanimous sorcerer” that induced a condition of being receptive to mirages to exert its power over its subjects. These included: the division of the workforce into modern, petrochemical centers and backward, agricultural peripheries, the identification of certain minoritarian social groups with the nation’s interests in the oil industry, and the “imagined community” formed by the perceived collective ownership of the nation’s natural body.29 In practical terms, the realization of

28 Emphasis mine. José Ignacio Cabrujas quoted in Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1. See also, “El Estado del Disimulo,” a 1987 interview with Cabrujas realized by the editors (Luis García Mora, Víctor Suárez, Trino Márquez and Ramón Hernández) of the Caracas-based magazine Estado & Reforma. In Bruno Mateo, Ciudad Escrita (blog), August 3, 2012, accessed January 13, 2015, http://ciudadescrita.blogspot.com/ 2012/08/ entrevista-realizada-jose-ignacio.html. In that interview, Cabrijas stated: “No hay ningún milagro posible en una mazorca, como no sea el milagro de la tierra. Una mazorca de maíz cuesta tres centavos, cuatro centavos, cinco centavos, seis centavos. Esas son, en términos de precio, las únicas sorpresas que puede darnos. El petróleo es diferente. Espectacularmente diferente. Hoy valía medio dólar. Mañana tres. Después seis, doce, veinticuatro, hasta treinta y seis dólares. No se trata de una economía fundamentada en el fatigoso esfuerzo, en el ‘un poquito hoy’ y ‘un poquito mañana’. Se trata de un show económico. El petróleo es fantástico y por lo tanto induce a la ilusión de un milagro. Creó en la práctica la ‘cultura del milagro’. Por primera vez, el Estado venezolano había hecho un ‘buen negocio’, lo cual, viéndolo bien, resultaba excepcional dada su costumbre de hacer pésimos negocios.”

29 Coronil, The Magical State, 2−4, 8. Coronil’s understanding of an imagined community derives from the work of Benedict Anderson whose watershed book Imagined Communities was initially published in 1983 and substantially revised in 1991 and 2006. Anderson believed print capitalism—the increased use of the printing press beginning in the sixteenth century capitalist marketplace—as well as the several outlets

Coronil’s “magical state” depended on the self-fashioning of Venezuela as a modern

nation. This outward projection was fueled, in large part, by the exploration of its subsoil

as well as by the commodities and structures that it allowed Venezuelans access to in their

own country.

In Chapter 1, “The Site of Paradise,” I argue that petroleum revenue allowed

Venezuelans to acquire and not produce the same “modernity” that had been created elsewhere in response to vastly different conditions. Instead functionalism and the varied

genealogies of Constructivism, geometric-abstraction and kinetic art in particular, became

the architectural and aesthetic signposts of this elusive paradigm. Yet internal conditions

limited the problematic influence of these ideologically “neutral” international tendencies

as well as of the overarching national modernizing project of which they were a part. A

close examination of extant texts and photographs by El Techo reveals how the group

challenged the cultural establishment, exposed its political dissidence, and anchored its

project in the harsh material reality of the human underbelly that fueled the dreams of progress in Venezuela.

In Chapter 2, “Betwixt and Between: Informalism and the Passage to Art

Terrorism,” I address how in the context of this less than perfect panorama Informalism represented the visual manifestation of a growing discontent with the economic conditions that spurned the “make-believe” at the core of Cabrujas’ and Coronil’s diatribes. Here, I

of the more recent mass media system, helped to spread vernacular languages and common notions on nation (“an imagined political community”) that, ultimately, formed intangible and elastic (yet coherently and comprehensibly understood) imagined communities. See: Benedict R. O’Gorman Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; reprint, London: Verso, 1991), 6−7.

borrow from the economic theories of George Bataille (1897−1962), who argued that economic wealth and growth governed the physical force field of all organic phenomena.

I propose that by the early sixties Venezuela’s unspent energetic surplus had begun to unleash a destructive process from popular segments of the population that, it may be argued, is climaxing in present-day Chavismo. For Bataille, civilization revealed its order or lack thereof through its treatment of what he called the accursed share. This expendable waste was either put to unproductive use in the fulfillment of useless activities—erotic transgressions or the attainment of luxury, for example—or resulted in its outrageous and catastrophic outpouring. This included war or destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatened the prevailing system. Bataille’s thinking revealed the paradox of utility, or life “beyond [the realm] of utility” as he described it: its ultimate end could only be uselessness as sovereignty was achieved only by those who consumed but did not labor.30

For El Techo and a number of Venezuelan adherents of Informalism, the movement

initially offered a potentially viable pathway for expending excess and left-over critical

creativity. By 1964, however, the hardline right-wing approach of Rómulo Betancourt’s

government resulted in the militarization of the extreme Left and in uncontrollable urban

and rural explosions of guerilla warfare. Coupled with the increased commercialization of

Informalism, these economic and political events led to the collective’s radicalization and

further distanced it from any sort of sympathy for the aesthetic tendency. I argue that

30 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption (1946−49; reprint, New York: Zone Books, 1991), 198.

Informalism became just one element in El Techo’s far more complex politically charged

artistic practice following a crucial Venezuelan turning point between the 1961 and 1964

period.

Upturned Modernity

In the second part of the dissertation, “Upturned Modernity,” I examine three case

studies where El Techo deliberately inverted Venezuela’s internationally aligned

modernity, which was based on a program of constant evolution and progress in the visual

arts. This strategy was the chief value that held its work together during the critical 1961

to 1964 period when it questioned the weight of Informalism and in later years when it

turned to an alternate political lineage in its proposals.

El Techo was part of a minority of international artists that refocused their energies on codifying the antinomies at play during the aftermath of WWII (1939−45).31 Factions within the artistic mainstream broke away from pure or, one could argue, politically uncommitted abstraction to adopt anachronistic postures. Rather than advancing abstraction to such logical conclusions as multisensory proposals, non-objectual practices, and action-based interventions, these artists turned deliberately and abruptly to the past as

31 For example, such paradoxes as North American artists who swore by the precepts of early European modernism while longing to be acknowledged as “American” innovators, or French artists caught between the desire to re-invent the School of Paris as a cell of the international art circuit (as opposed to the ‘French School’ sponsored during the Occupation) and a need to distinguish their own French lineage. For more on these and other anomalies, see: Dore Ashton, “À rebours: The Informal Rebellion,” À rebours: La rebellion informalista/The Informal Rebellion [1939-1968] (Las Palmas: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 1999), 17−45, 35−36.

their way out of what they viewed as a disheartening present.32 The shifting dynamic

represented an espousal of the notion of being, literally, “against the times” as art critic

Dore Ashton acknowledged in her introductory essay to one of the first major exhibitions

on global Informalism.33 At stake was a common attitude of regression cemented in an urgency to record somehow mankind’s tempestuous condition in light of a contentious and isolating sociopolitical climate. In 1960, Juan Calzadilla wrote in “Por un arte de hoy…,” which introduced Venezuelan Informalism to audiences in Los Teques and Valencia, that

“the optimism of the constructivists and geometrics was replaced by anguish and insecurity, feelings that return[ed] man to the center of the creative problem.”34 A year later he observed that painters were “…closer to life than ever. Art is tired of shapes. It demands meanings… What is important is the lived experience.”35 For these artists from

32 Simón Marchán Fiz wrote that Informalism responded to an aesthetic of speed directly tied to the spread of industrialization and economic progress. The experience and act of painting gained primacy over the work and, with the hastening of speed, there would come a time when the work itself would cease to exist. The result of this vacuous strain of painting, it was thought, would be the artistic action-gesture. Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte de concepto, 81−82. Many artists associated with geometric- abstraction and constructivism took this route. Among the Latin Americans, these included the Brazilians Hélio Oiticica (1937−80), Lygia Clark (1920–88), or Lygia Pape (1927–2004), and, in Venezuela Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, or Gego.

33 The posture recalls a similar position adopted by fin-de-siècle French literati such as the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine (1844−96), for instance, who described his stance as “…not march[ing] in step with [our] epoch but[, rather, being] altogether ‘à rebours’.” Paul Verlaine, Le Décadent (15 January 1888): 1, quoted in Ashton, “À rebours,” 18.

34 See: Juan Calzadilla, “Por un arte de hoy…” (Valencia, Venezuela: Ateneo de Valencia, 1960) and (Los Teques: Biblioteca Cecilio Acosta, 1960).

35 “El arte está cansado de formas. Exige ahora significados, los sonidos interiores de que hablaba Kandinsky. Lo que parece ahora iconoclasta no es más que necesidad de ruptura para dar origen a una realidad nueva. Si el resultado será válido, no es cosa de nosotros; lo importante es la experiencia vivida.” Moisés Ottop [Juan Calzadilla], “Carta al informalismo,” El Nacional (Caracas) (May 1961) in Rama, Antología, 167−71.

the sixties, including the balleneros, the concern became to create art that reflected not a

technological Utopia (associated with capitalism) but, rather, the grit of contemporaneity.

In Chapter 3, “Why the Whale?,” I examine several ways in which El Techo remained rooted in the past in order to define its collective visual identity: the perpetuation of medieval symbolism; the adscription to old European literary models such as the kennings of ancient Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Old German literatures; and the repeated use of sources from Latin American colonial print culture. I explore the rationale behind the name itself, el techo de la ballena [the roof of the whale]. Drawing from the group’s extant documentary record, I argue that both of the elements in the double construct of “the roof” and “the whale” functioned as allegories for an accumulative practice characterized by the juxtaposition of disarticulated elements. Key concepts such as

Dámaso Ogaz’s lo majamámico, moreover, justified the transformation of contemporaneity into a vital space often identified with the group’s principal leitmotif, the

whale. The allusion also suggested how the group’s political attitude could be construed

as assemblages that broke the mold from the inside, as in the frequently invoked Old

Testament story of Jonah and the Whale. These convex operations, which Ogaz described

as acciones desde dentro [actions from the innermost], allowed El Techo to implode the

established art circuit and contest the status quo in Venezuela.

In the next two chapters, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, I investigate two paradigmatic

exhibitions Homenaje a la cursilería (May 1961) and Homenaje a la necrofilia (October

1962). These related chapters find grounding in the Freudian uncanny—frightful aspects

of domesticity tethering between familiarity and unfamiliarity that have been repressed—

and its succeeding recovery and critical redirection. The notion suggests a useful

alternative framework for reading El Techo that transcends both stylistic analysis and

sociocultural approaches to art history. The group’s recovery of repressed vernacular values (chapter 4) and the sexual fetishization of death (chapter 5) fulfilled an overarching interest in unsettling bourgeois values through shock and provocation.

Additionally, events such as Homenaje a la cursilería and Homenaje a la necrofilia allowed the group to define the contours of an increasingly unified multidisciplinary corpus that took an independent and non-linear path. At stake were gestures that anticipated the

Latin American shift from “a craft-defined art” to the open-ended ontological pronouncements and procedures of Conceptualism, in which medium or technique became

subservient to ideas and concepts.36 Here, I build on theorists including Dick Higgins and

Guy Debord (1931−94), who helped to define the artistic structures that emerged from the

blurring of the lines between traditional media. In this sense, I demonstrate how in specific

cases El Techo’s transformations of found and everyday objects, images, and texts

anticipated the similar anti-aesthetic praxes of better-known international groups.37

In Chapter 4, “The Authority of Kitsch,” I study how Homenaje a la cursilería’s

format as an archival environment consisting of wallpapered and table-top collages made

out of torn book and newspaper pages, photographs, political posters, bric-a-brac and other

36 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 202.

37 For example, the Italian critic Germano Celant (b. b. 1940) did not publish “Notes for a Guerilla,” his fundamental treatise on Arte Povera, nor mount their first exhibition until 1967 (at Galleria La Bertesca- Masnata in Genoa), six years after El Techo organized its first exhibitions and published its first manifesto, “El Gran Magma.” Originally published in rayado sobre el techo, no. 1 (Caracas), March 1961, it was included in Rama’s Antología, 51. For Arte Povera’s foundational text, see: Germano Celant, “Notes for a Guerilla,” Flash Art (Milan) no. 5 (1967).

found elements, allowed it to be read as a potent gesture against bourgeois notions of

etiquette, taste, and social practices. In a manifesto accompanying the exhibit, El Techo

emphasized lo cursi (melodramatic flare and excessively sentimentality bordering on the

ridiculous) and lo pavoso (the distasteful conduits of bad luck). The balleneros believed

that these vernacular traits were often repressed in official discourse, particularly those

intended for international circulation. Yet here the group reclaimed them as the defining

parameters for its selection of materials. I argue that Homenaje a la cursilería represented

an oppositional posture against the banalities and superficiality of the country’s outwardly

projected state of affairs. The recuperation and redirection of the kitsch aspects of

Venezuelan culture became the basis for a critique on the partial nature of national

“modernity.” At the same time, El Techo’s use of these popular behavioral traits also

required it to confront and destabilize the Situationist notion of the spectacle, that numbing

corpus of commodities and experiences that alienated the capitalist body from the pain of

real life.

In Chapter 5, “Dead Matter for an Enlivened Practice,” I demonstrate that the

incorporation of dead matter allowed artist Carlos Contramaestre, and El Techo more

broadly, to reflect on the same generalized sense of worldwide decay that had compelled

the global informalists to return art to mankind’s perilous existence at the dawn of the Cold

War. Contramaestre’s exercise entailed a conflation of the Freudian sexual and death instincts that André Breton had dealt with in the preface to the program of the controversial film L’Âge d’Or (1930) by the Spanish Surrealists Luis Buñuel (1900−83) and Salvador

Dalí (1904−89).38 I argue, however, that Venezuela’s “atmosphere of death, of brutal violence” required El Techo to take these common concerns to an unprecedented extreme.39 The difference in approach stemmed from El Techo’s deliberate placement of

its disruptions not on the surrealist negation of the real but, rather, on a contrarian, and

much more violent co-optation of the actual conditions of contemporary Venezuelans.

Undeniably, this regressive stance mirrored life as it was and not art as it would be. The group’s posture, I argue, invariably inverted an indivisible, but opposing, rhetoric stressing

the potential of a primordial geological matter: that complicated process it referred to as

the restitution of magma from its inception.

Following the body of the work, I present an epilogue that traces El Techo’s

disintegration in the second half of the sixties as represented by a metaphorical “roof of the

whale” that succumbed to a sea of troubles brought about by the decomposition of fads.

Here, I question the group’s legacy in light of the crumbling instability of its time. Finally,

the brief conclusion provides a lexicon that returns to the defining concepts that El Techo’s

production brought to light.

38 As Hal Foster wrote, Breton’s engagement of the concept of the death drive resulted in contradictions. On the one hand, Breton embraced the theory in order to place it at the service of revolution but then, in projects such L’Âge d’Or, elided it in favor of the restitution of love [Eros] as the primary emancipatory force for the Surrealists. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 16.

39 Edmundo Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 132.

CHAPTER 1 – THE SITE OF PARADISE1

Venezuela is rolling. And it’s rolling in cars and trucks made in Venezuela. Chrysler is rolling along in step with the progress of a great democratic nation.2

—Chrysler Corporation, c. 1968

Si [los pescadores] nos reunimos y reclamamos, nos acusan de terroristas. …Estamos a merced de [las compañías petroleras], pero no van a cesar los derrames de petróleo. ¡Ah! cará, yo pienso irme de aquí, yo no me voy a morir. …Y ahí quedarán las compañías petroleras despidiendo y arruinando pueblos hasta que se agote el petróleo.3

— Pozo muerto, 1967

In the screenplay for Pozo muerto, a 1967 documentary film by ballenero Edmundo

Aray and the filmmakers Antonio de la Rosa and Carlos Rebolledo, Nemesio Hidalgo denounced a recent oil spill that had rendered that year’s shrimp crop worthless and

1 The title for this chapter comes from a section of Asfalto-Infierno, a collaboration between Adriano González León and Daniel González, appropriately titled “EL SITIO DEL PARAISO.” See González León and González, Asfalto-Infierno (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1963), 10.

2 Chrysler Corporation in Adriano González León, País Portátil (1968; published Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1969), 180.

3 Edmundo Aray, Antonio de la Rosa, and Carlos Rebolledo, Pozo muerto (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, January 1967), n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 33, box 25). Also in Rama, Antología, 160−63, 163.

threatened to destroy the traditional livelihood of fishing communities along Lake

Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela. Perhaps the first film to denounce the ruinous

effects of oil exploitation in the country, Pozo muerto (figs. 1.1 a-d) interwove the

narratives of three characters: Víctor Gómez, a rural barber who, lured by tales of riches

for Venezuelan workers, migrated to a petroleum camp only to find himself destitute; José

Semprún, a journalist who spent most of his career chronicling the rise and dramatic fall

of oil enclaves such as Cabimas and Lagunillas; and, finally, Nemesio, a fisherman.4

In the film’s third sequence, Tasajera, Nemesio spoke of the townsfolk’s

impotence against mammoth oil interests, their vanishing way of life, and the impossibility

for their communal actions to generate any significant change or, minimally, to be heard:

Petroleum companies do anything they want [here]. As if it were a mere coincidence that we are Venezuelan and Venezuelans do not have any rights in our own country. [At first] we used to fish at night and did not realize that [there had been] an oil spill. When we made the claim, the spill ceased and we returned to our shrimping. Then came more spills [but] if we said something [about these], we were taken to jail.5

As is palpable from Nemesio’s testimony, the film brought to the fore the truncated hopes

of widespread prosperity for all Venezuelans and exposed the faulty realities of a

4 An earlier film, Assignment: Venezuela, had been produced in 1956 with the theme of petroleum exploitation in Venezuela (24:18 min., produced by Sound Masters, Inc.). Sponsored by the Creole Petroleum Corporation, Assignment: Venezuela was intended as an informational piece on what relocating American families were to expect life in the new lives at the oilfields of Lagunillas. Yet Pozo muerto was the first to present the issue of petroleum critically and from a Venezuelan perspective. It was followed by Daniel Oropeza’s Maracaibo Petroleum Company of 1974 (screenplay by David Alizo, one of El Techo’s collaborators in the sixties).

5 “Las compañías petroleras hacen lo que les da la gana. Como da la casualidad de que somos venezolanos y los venezolanos no tenemos derecho en este mismo país. De noche uno estaba pescando y no se daba de cuenta con el petróleo porque uno no es como el gato. Cuando hicimos el reclamo, cesó el derrame. Volvimos a pescar camarones. Volvieron los derrames. Si uno decía algo iba pa’ la cárcel.” Aray, et al., “Pozo muerto,” 162.

developmentalist project that, in effect, had been negotiated at the expense of voiceless

citizens such as the documentary’s protagonists. Yet, perhaps more importantly, Pozo

muerto was one of the last in an expansive list of projects that the members of El Techo de

la Ballena developed since 1961 which, in one way or another, resisted the country’s

expedited modernization and challenged such blindingly optimistic assertions as Chrysler

de Venezuela’s slogan: “Venezuela is rolling.”6

At midcentury, Venezuela modified its economic relationship with the developed world by becoming one of its chief sources for petroleum and its derivatives in exchange for access to a pre-packaged modernity that originated outside of its national borders.

Supplied primarily by U.S. interlocutors, it included a comprehensive model of cultural modernism initially conceived in early twentieth-century Europe that combined spatial, social, and scientific elements. However, the notion of the total work of art and the related aesthetics that emerged in Venezuela must be framed within the broader context of a national imperative to “modernize.” Irrespective of its sources, the local adaptation of the

Utopian forms of this emergent Gesamtkunstwerk (understood as either the ideal work of art or a synthesis of the arts) had to do with an overarching ideology of progress connected to the welfare state and to concepts of beauty, hygiene, and even physical cleansing through

6 Chrysler’s operations in Venezuela began in 1950 with a partnership between the Chrysler Corporation and the Caracas-based Ensamblaje Venezolana S.A. to assemble and market its vehicles (Dodge, Plymouth, and De Soto makes) locally. The 1957 acquisition of Ensamblaje Venezolana from the Phelps family gave way to Chrysler de Venezuela S.A., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chrysler Corporation of the United States. See: “Chrysler de Venezuela. 55 años ensamblando Valores e Historia,” Chrysler de Venezuela, accessed May 23, 2014, http://www.chryslerdevenezuela.com.ve/nuestra_historia/nuestra_ historia.htm.

architecture.7 The most notable practitioners of this trend included the London-born and

French-trained Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900−75) as well as a cadre

of North American architects working for U.S. oil interests in the country. Yet the concept

of the total work of art that developed in Venezuela obviated the wider problems of rampant political repression, inequitable distribution of wealth, and uneven patterns of development.

An Emerging (North American) Physiognomy of Modernity

To understand better Venezuela’s process of cultural creation in the postwar period, we must first grasp the underlying rationale of the historical context and social tensions that were at stake. A prodigiously rich moment in Venezuelan history, during this period the national canon was questioned by a radicalized countercultural faction of which El

Techo was a pivotal protagonist. However, what gets our attention immediately is the

dramatic character of global changes at this time, as Nicolau Sevcenko has noted in the

context of the emergence of Concrete and Neo-Concrete art in Brazil in the fifties.

Compounding a generational divide between those who fought the war and the children

who were increasingly challenging their defunct set of values, the most significant

7 In this critical sense, the Venezuelan understanding of the total work of art was perhaps more closely related to a variant of urban planning that Paul Rabinow coined “middling modernism.” Rabinow understood this as a universal style of urbanism of a technocratic inclination that justified its sterilility through a rhetoric of science, efficiency, and social welfare. As the more extreme alternative to his parallel concept of “technocosmopolitansim,” which was more mindful of sedimented historical practices, “middling modernism” sought to create a “New Man, purified and liberated to pursue new forms of sociality that, it was believed, would inevitably arise from health spaces and forms.” See Paul Rabinow, “France in Morocco: Technocosmopolitanism and Middling Modernism,” Assemblage (MIT Press), no. 17 (April 1992), 52−57, 54.

immediate outcome of WWII was, perhaps, an incipient Cold War climate where the

budding political conflict was waged on a cultural battlefield. Indeed, as Sevcenko suggested, the mid-twentieth century opened the door to a supranational circuit of exchange

and alliances propagated through increasingly more globalized advertising, television, and

other channels of information as well as by a growing demand and availability of goods,

services and, especially, images.8

With the rise of the United States as the dominant economic postwar power among the Western Bloc, moreover, much of this mass-mediated “artillery” was inexorably linked to the propagation of an “imported cosmopolitism” that, in the cultural sphere, the Caracas- based architectural historian Arturo Almandoz has framed in the context of the “seduction of the United States.”9 This was the literal inflection point when Venezuela turned to the

U.S. for referents and adopted an international formula for modernization stressing

homogenization as its defining precept. Indeed, the concert of culturally aligned nations

at midcentury, including Venezuela, expedited the implementation of innovative models

and parameters that mirrored in many respects the optimistic vision fueling social, urban,

8 Nicolau Sevcenko, “Brazilian Concretismo: Introductory Remarks on Postwar History and Culture,” in Building on a Construct. The Adolpho Leiriner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, ed. Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts distributed by Yale University Press, 2009), 11−40, 13−14.

9 Arturo Almandoz, “La americanización venezolana en ensayos y novelas de los años 1960 y 1970,” Anales de la Universidad Metropolitana (Caracas) 4, no. 1 (Nueva Serie, 2004): 183−200, 184. Similarly, Luis González Casas has highlighted the impact of petroleum economy in consolidating a “modern” circuit in Venezuela for the consumption and exchange of goods modelled after the United States. See: González Casas, “Modernity for import and export: The United States influence on the architecture and urbanism of Caracas,” Colloqui XI (Spring 1996): 64−77.

and economic developments in North America and, to lesser extent, Europe after the

Marshal Plan (1948−52).10

If the war had left much of Europe destroyed and many cities in ruins, at midcentury

the United States responded to the perceived vulnerability of its wartime home front (fig.

1.2) by reconfiguring its own framework for national development and internal middle-

class expansion. Satellite centers of productivity emerged throughout the country shifting

the attention away from the cities and requiring the construction of highly integrated

systems of both expressways and airports.11 Human capital was also spatially reorganized as higher-income and skilled workers were dispersed to garden communities in the suburbs while the neediest sectors of the population remained relegated to the old, decaying, and increasingly unsafe urban centers. Paradoxically, the underclasses that were left behind

shared the city with central ceremonial complexes—the seats of government and law

enforcement, public monuments, museums, national shrines—from which traffic and

people were distributed through a nexus of expressways along planned radii. What was at

stake, in essence, was the consolidation of a U.S.-driven cosmopolitan and

10 Almandoz, “La americanización venezolana,” 184. Certainly, as Almandoz has underscored, the architectural and urbanistic modernity that was imported by Venezuela at midcentury rested on North American forms and temporalities that were, ironically, often transmitted by European architects and planners including Le Corbusier or José Luis Sert i López (1902−83). Later in life, Sert spent over forty years in the United States.

11 As early as 1948, the Venezuelan state commissioned a number of important studies to U.S. planners including Robert Moses (1888−1981), who had helped to transform New York City’s transportation network. Along with six other American consultants, Morris developed an arterial plan that emphasized the construction of a hierarchical system of expressways as well as recognized the importance of integrating the port city of La Guaira, the site of Caracas’ airport, into an emerging system. See Luis González Casas, “Nelson A. Rockefeller y la modernidad venezolana: intercambios, empresas y lugares a mediados del siglo XX,” in Petroleo nuestro y ajeno. La ilusión de la modernidad, ed. Juan José Martínez Frechilla and Yolanda Texera Arnal (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Consejo de Desarrollo Cinetífico, 2005), 173−214, 195.

internationalized physiognomy for “modern” nations dominated by trains, planes, and

automobiles privileging those whose economic means allowed for their personal

displacement (figs. 1.3a-b).

The model was exported to Europe in the form of a potential pattern for

reconstruction under the Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP),

and to Latin America through the economic and financial programs of Kennedy’s strategic

Alliance for Progress (1961−69) (fig. 1.4). Growing out of the fear of increased Soviet and

Cuban influence in Latin America, Washington policymakers saw the Alliance as a means

of bulwarking capitalist economic growth, funding social reforms to help the poorest Latin

Americans, promoting “democracy” during a decade when the CIA supported most of the

region’s military coup d’états, and strengthening ties between the United States and its

southern neighbors after Cuba declared its socialist statehood. In his January 1961

inaugural address, President Kennedy (1917−63) pledged to the United States’ “sister

republics…to convert our good words into good deeds in a new alliance for progress—to

assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.”12 He outlined a plan requiring “a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the [Latin] American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”13 While sectors within

the Latin American elites espoused the Alliance for Progress’ model for productive and

12 John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1961, record of the White House Signal Agency (WO#30806, RG274) (Boston: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, USG-17), accessed February 2, 2015, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/BqXIEM9F4024ntFl7SVAjA.aspx.

13 Ibid.

social reorganization (with manifold degrees of success), much of the investment that their

countries were expected to contribute towards the rebuilding of their own economies never

materialized. In fact, hindsight has shown how, through the influx of over $20 billion in

assistance to these economies, the plan further marginalized those disenfranchised

populations whose living standards it had originally promised to improve.14 In Venezuela

however, participation in the Alliance for Progress reinforced the United States’ status as

preferential trading partner in the trafficking of modernity, a process locally understood as

the means for collecting goods and infrastructure that were produced elsewhere.

The Two-Story Country: Oil as the Driving Force for Venezuelan Development

The literal construction of the new Venezuela, a process that entailed the physical

destruction and dismantling of the old country, had begun in the years following General

Juan Vicente Gómez’s (1857−1935) third and last term as president (1931−35).15

Responding to a desire to do away with the authoritarianism and backwardness associated with his regime, Gómez’s immediate successors—José Eleazar López Contreras

(1883−1973, in office 1935−41) and Isaías Medina Angarita (1897−1953, in office

14 Literature on the shortcomings and failures of the Alliance for Progress is abundant. See, for example: Ronald L. Scheman, The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective (New York: Praeger, 1988); Tony Smith, “The Alliance for Progress: The 1960s,” in Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 71−89; Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 150−52; or Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (London: Routledge, 2007).

15 A career military man with unyielding power, Gómez served as president of Venezuela three times—from 1908 to 1913, from 1922 to 1929, and from 1931 to 1935—and, through a series of hand-picked puppet presidents, was de facto ruler for much of the 1908 to 1935 period.

1941−45)—initiated programs that sought a radical break not only from the authoritarianism imposed by Gómez during his long rule (from 1908 to 1935) but, perhaps more importantly, from the same anachronistic aspects of Venezuelan culture that, paradoxically, longed for a fast-tracked future. More precisely, those elements of the national culture that remained in concert with the slower rhythms associated with agricultural cycles. To a large degree, Gómez’s successors promoted total investment in oil as the exclusive means of realizing the rapid political and economic transformation that they aspired for Venezuela and which, in 1936, the avant-garde writer and politician Arturo

Uslar Pietri (1906−2001) had summarized with the slogan “sembrar el petróleo” [or “sow the oil”].16 Indeed, oil exploitation effected an important modification of the economic dynamic in Venezuela by shifting the attention from the agricultural soil to its subsoil, as

Orlando Araujo noted three decades later.17

By the fifties, the justification for Venezuelan development was framed by an all-

encompassing set of measures—known as El Nuevo Ideal Nacional—and the resulting

16 “Si hubiéramos de proponer una divisa para nuestra política económica lanzaríamos la siguiente, que nos parece resumir dramáticamente esa necesidad de invertir la riqueza producida por el sistema destructivo de la mina, en crear riqueza agrícola reproductiva y progresiva: sembrar el petróleo.” Arturo Uslar Pietri, “Editorial: Sembrar el petróleo,” Diario Ahora (Caracas) 1, no. 183 (July 14, 1936): 1. By 1990, however, Uslar Pietri was chastising Venezuela as “una nación fingida” that had failed to live up to its own aspirations. See: Uslar Pietri, Los venezolanos y el petróleo (Caracas: Banco Nacional de Venezuela, 1991), 87–88.

17 The success of early oil concessions to the Venezuelan Development Company Limited (1909), Caribbean Petroleum (in 1912, then under the control of Royal Dutch Shell), and Colon Development Company (1913, also owned by the Shell group), played an important part in this fundamental modification. Orlando Araujo, Venezuela violenta (1968; reprint Caracas: Banco Central de Venezuela, Colección Venezuela y su Petróleo, 2013), 39. For a history of these concessions, see: Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., Oil concessions: sovereignty concessions, accessed April 30, 2014, http://www.pdvsa.com/ index.php?tpl=interface.en/design/readmenuhist.tpl.html&newsid_obj_id=1942&newsid_temas=13.

Doctrina del Bien Nacional that military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1914−2001, in

office, 1953−58) set in motion from the moment that he assumed the role of Provisional

President on December 2, 1952.18 Hinging upon the proceeds of petroleum exploitation,

the goal of his right-wing ideological framework was, literally, to “transform Venezuela’s

physical environment and improve the moral, intellectual, and material condition of

Venezuelans.” It manifested itself through an orchestrated set of projects intended to

stimulate national economy while strengthening military power.19 During the apex of

Pérez Jiménez’s regime, these parallel goals resulted in the professionalization of the

military system (which he used to his political advantage), the development of

hydroelectric and steel industries in Guayana as part of a larger geopolitical plan to

integrate this raw material-rich Eastern region to the center, and an increased investment in national systems of railways and highways, thermoelectric plants, and dams and reservoirs (all benefitting foreign partners).

Paradoxically, the country’s petroleum industry concentrated its activities in traditionally agrarian regions—Zulia, Estado Falcón and Estados Orientales (fig. 1.5)— where it coexisted with an outdated system of latifundia that had changed very little since colonial times. In fact, the petroleum economy excluded these regions’ thousands of

18 Pérez Jiménez held this position until April 19, 1953 when the country’s National Assembly appointed him President of the Republic.

19 “…transformar el medio físico con la finalidad de optimizar la calidad de vida del venezolano, a través de lo material, lo moral y lo intelectual.” See Fredy Rincón N[oriega], El Nuevo Ideal Nacional y los planes Económico-Militares de Pérez Jiménez. 1952−1957 (Caracas: Ediciones CENTAURO, 1982), 23−26, 41.

landless peasants who had waited for an agrarian reform that never panned out. By the

sixties, there were over one million such farmers (approximately 30% of Venezuela’s

active population) on the bottom rungs of a backward agricultural system while a privileged set of Venezuelan oil and gas workers (thirty thousand in total, or less than 2% of the national workforce) enjoyed the momentum of what was by then a limitless oil sector.20 In

the decades between the late thirties and early sixties, Venezuela became the country with the highest per capita income in Latin America. At the same time, studies performed by government technocrats during the latter part of the period demonstrated how large rural and urban masses continued to earn incomes that were crassly below the poverty line.21 To

compound this situation, at least until the nationalization of the oil industry in 1976, the

vast majority of Venezuelan oil revenue went oversees to the foreign oil conglomerates

controlling the gargantuan industry.22 The resulting structural imbalance left the majority

of Venezuelans in a pre-modern condition while advancing a lucky few to a chimerical

hyper-modernity. The disparity produced the same sort of problematic cultural dislocation

20 Educated and largely from the agrarian oligarchy and professional urban bourgeoisie, these workers aligned themselves with vested foreign interests, organized themselves in labor unions, and negotiated for themselves significantly higher salaries relative to the workers that remained engaged in agricultural labor. See: Araujo, Venezuela violenta, 19−20.

21 Ibid., 17.

22As early as 1936, Juan de Guruceaga—the publisher of the Caracas-based Ahora where Rómulo Betancourt’s (anonymous) editorial “Economía y Finanzas” appeared regularly between June 1937 and October 1939—criticized that petroleum and its byproducts unhealthily accounted for 92% of the country’s exports (versus a mere 8% for agricultural products). For every twelve bolívares that Venezuela exported, de Guruceaga wrote in an editorial, eleven went to foreign nationals and only one remained in the country. Moreover, foreign run oil companies netted earnings of 1,300,000 bolívares daily and the vast majority of these productive riches left Venezuela. See: Juan de Guruceaga, “Bs. 1.300.000 de ganacia líquida se llevan los petroleros,” Diario Ahora (Caracas) 1, no. 183 (1936).

that was at the root of Néstor García Canclini’s Culturas híbridas (1989).23 Indeed, the uniquely Venezuelan phenomenon of the social ascendance and spatial reorganization of a relatively small number of specialized petroleum workers at the expense of vast agricultural underclasses resulted in what Araujo described as a two-storied country whose frontiers were delineated by the inequitable poles of agriculture (misery, national ownership) and petroleum (wealth, foreign ownership).24 In the emerging system,

Venezuela’s pre-capitalist agricultural traditions entered into constant confrontation with the fast-paced transformations associated with an ultramodern, petroleum-based, economy.

Pérez Jiménez’s swift and, to many degrees, superficial brand of development followed a “top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach” where those at the top

23 García Canclini has argued that in Latin America the unilateral view of an experiential modernity did not express a socioeconomic modernization but, rather, “the means by which the [local] elites [took] charge of the intersection of different historical temporalities and tr[ied] to elaborate a global [national] project with them…” His position is an adaptation of Perry Anderson’s “Modernity and Revolution” (1984), a rebuttal to All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982) by Marshall Berman. Anderson argued that, as a notion, “Modernism” is “the emptiest of all cultural categories” as it eschews a “wide variety of very diverse—indeed incompatible—aesthetic practices […that] were unified post hoc in a portmanteau concept whose only referent is the blank passage of time itself.” In this sense, he proposed that regions or countries enter modernity independently, at the pace at which they become industrialized. His model thus permited local artists and intellectuals to assimilate the associated economic, developmental, and social changes accordingly and to develop corresponding discourses as the changes are acknowledged. Echoing Perry, García Canclini rightfully asserted that the Latin American case in extremis exhibited “more complex articulation of traditions and modernities (diverse and unequal) [with] multiple logics of development.” To counter the negative consequences of this phenomenon, García Canclini offered a layered conception of culture taking into account the co-existence of popular, cultured, and mass-based art forms that, in Latin America, resulted in hybrid expressions rendering the arbitrary oppositions between tradition and modernity obsolete. See: Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. Strategies for Entering and leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (1990; reprint Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 9, 46. First appeared as: Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (1989; published Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1990); Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” 112−13; and note 26 in the Introduction.

24 In this conception, industrialization is a midpoint between agriculture and the petroleum industry. Araujo, Venezuela violenta, 53−55.

excluded people like Nemesio Hidalgo, the fisherman from Pozo muerto.25 Certainly, as

Arturo Escobar denounced in retrospect, this type of accelerated Third World development that was exacerbated in Venezuela thanks to its vast petroleum reserves ultimately led to massive underdevelopment and impoverishment.26 The irony of this phenomenon was not

lost on El Techo; the group was acutely aware of it by the early sixties when publishing

Daniel González’s photograph “Una disyuntiva: la gastronomía o el hambre” [A quandary:

gastronomy or hunger] as a sarcastic postcard calling attention to a protest by members of the Syndicate of Gastronomic Workers against hunger, misery, and unemployment (fig.

1.6).

El Techo the la Ballena made many direct allusions to the contradictory realities of

the outwardly promised and mass-mediated projection of Venezuela as a developed

country, on the one hand, and, on the other, the disenchantment with the persistent misery

that guaranteed the “progress” underwritten by a state repressive apparatus that “protected”

against civilian unrest. In Twist presidencial: todo está en regla of 1963, Edmundo Aray

25 Much of this developmentalist discourse was elaborated by First World theoreticians and politicos for implementation across the Third World. A United Nations report “for the economics of underdeveloped countries” of 1951, for example, noted how “there is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful adjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of cast, creed and race have to burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of economic progress.” United Nations, Report “for the economics of underdeveloped countries” (New York: United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, [1951]), 15.

26 Arturo Escobar reached this conclusion through careful analysis of case studies (Colombia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, among them) from the developing world; his claims, however, are substantiated for a Venezuelan context as well. See Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

was blunt about establishing the duality as he vacillated between a somber journalistic tone

and the frivolous language of advertising slogans:

Goods at duty-free prices. Harry Belafonte sings in a pick-up [truck] bought with credit…Come to Venezuela. It is an unforgettable experience…(parenthesis)…Get to know Venezuela while sailing on a metal yacht. Life in the jungle and life in the city: two lives in order…Get to know Venezuela. An unforgettable experience …, [a country] with supermarkets that open at night and department stores. Beaches, hygiene, happiness all for one Bolivar…. Besieged by fans, Captain Troy,27 gets ready to hit the Street.

…

Clarín, April sixteen. Every man for himself! Man from the Police’s Central Command and the National Guard shoots at Senator…Patience has its limit: protests [directed] at the Police superintendent…Brutality at the oil producing area.28

In an instant, Aray’s text transformed Caracas from the epitome of cool, a playground for

the rich and famous, to an Inferno where the unchecked powers of an unnamed president

[Rómulo Betancourt] were put to a test.

Adriano González León and Daniel González presented a similar indictment of

Venezuela as an ineffectual Utopia in their hallmark Asfalto-Infierno, also from 1963.

27 Reference to the American TV series Adventures in Paradise (broadcast by ABC from 1959 to 1962) starring Gardner McKay (1932−2001) as Adam Troy, the captain of the schooner Tiki III who sailed the South Pacific looking for adventure.

28 “Artículos a precio de puerto libre. Harry Belafonte canta en un pick-up tomado a crédito… Conozca a Venezuela. Es una experiencia inolvidable…(paréntesis)…Conozca a Venezuela navegando a bordo de una lancha de metal. La vida en la selva y la vida en la ciudad: dos vidas en regla…Conozca a Venezuela. Una experiencia inolvidable…, prevista de auto-mercado con servicio nocturno y tiendas por departamento. Playas, higiene y alegría por un bolívar…El Capitán Troy, asediado por sus admiradoras, se prepara para salir a la calle…Clarín, diez y seis de abril ¡Sálvese quien pueda! Hombre de la Dirección General de Policía y Guardia Nacional disparan contra Senador...La paciencia tiene su límite: protestan a comandante policial…Atropellos en zona petrolera.” Edmundo Aray, Twist presidencial: todo está en regla, No. 2 of Ediciones Tubulares del Techo de la Ballena (Caracas: La Muralla, 1963); in Rama, Antología, 141−143, 141−42.

Through the ultimate topographical inversion of Heaven and Hell, and the subsequent apocalypse that it created, González León’s text and González’s images fluctuated between scenes of Venezuela as a metaphorical site of paradise and its opposite, a dream that had turned sour for its sleepwalking people:

THE SITE OF PARADISE. In the beginning this festive mud…began as the wondrous tales in the dirty folios of notaries and buccaneers, voyagers that were turned into wolves by a sun that that was more effective than death…curve of the Earth, land of graces, hamlet of unheard of birds… a world for them and us…

…even in the gale-threatened schoolhouses, the tubercular teacher tells her equally tubercular students that this could have been the site of paradise. From there we still grovel…clots of our hunger and of outstretched arms that look to the sea, painting risen from petroleum’s great flame, exiled herein…in the shadows of our first industry, under the kind-hearted directives [of those] buccaneers who know how to perforate, [how] to get to the last bone to find the [same old] miracles [of petroleum]…Mister Smith, Mister So-and-so…29

With the fatalism of dark humor, González León locked national discourse into an economically imperialist conflict that could not shake off the powerful exoticism of the natural Arcadia that could have been had it not been for petroleum. Twist presidencial and

Asfalto-Infierno responded to a key moment in nation-building, 1963, when Venezuela had only recently been consolidated as a dominant oil-nation. Yet already by this time it had

29 My emphasis, the original reads as follows: “EL SITIO DEL PARAISO. Al principio de ese lodo festivo…comenzó la leyenda con notarios y bucaneros, infolios sucios para relatar maravillas, viajeros a los que volvió lobos un sol más eficaz que la muerte…Curva del globo, tierra de gracia, comarca de aves nunca vistas…el mundo para ellos y nosotros, aún en las escuelitas a medio techo llevados por el vendaval, y la maestra tísica contándole a muchachos igualmente tísicos que pudo haber sido el sitio del paraíso. Desde allí arrastramos…coágulos del hambre y los brazos abiertos hacia el mar, pintura levantada en la gran llama del petróleo, exiliados acá mismo,…, en la sombra o al reflejo bienhechor de nuestra primera industria, bajo la guía bondadosa de ellos, regidores, bucaneros que saben perforar, ir hasta el hueso último donde encontrar de nuevo los milagros papagayos [del petróleo]…míster Smith, míster quien sea…” González León, ‘EL SITIO DEL PARAISO,” Asfalto-Infierno, 10.

become evident that although petroleum provided the volatile foundations of the structures

that substantiated Venezuela’s modernity, it also highlighted the shakiness of the quicksand

of development and progress.

The Mirage of Progress

As oil revenue increased under the strong-arm of Pérez Jiménez’s administration,

the Venezuelan State embarked on massive public infrastructure projects that significantly

transformed the country. Paradoxically, this policy placed the State at odds with the

continuity of Venezuela’s slower national traditions. Following the pragmatic ideology

outlined by El Nuevo Ideal Nacional, the capital city of Caracas underwent a dramatic

spatial reorganization that necessitated the radical alteration of its geographic and

architectural landscape. Life in the urban perimeter unraveled somewhere between

military and civic rites. Entire Spanish-tiled blocks were cleared to make way for

ceremonial spaces that included the Paseo los Próceres (c. 1956)—a massive promenade

commemorating the heroes of South America’s Wars of Independence (1810−20)—and the monumental Plaza Venezuela (fig. 1.7) that, by 1951, had become Caracas’ neuralgic axis connecting expressways from the outlying areas with such vital urban arteries as the

Avenida Francisco de Miranda.

Countering these sites for civic ritual, however, were a number of equally impressive projects that functioned as spaces where urbanites could participate in the mass consumption of goods, services, advertising, and other mainstays of the North American

notion of modernity (fig. 1.8). Architectural commissions such as the Helicoide complex

(begun 1956−61 but completed 1965−67), the current seat of the Servicio Bolivariano de

Inteligencia Nacional (SEBIN), left little question of Venezuela’s ascendance as a site of

international modernity. Intended to house a luxury hotel, shopping center, private social club, park, and an exhibition hall on the top floor, El Helicoide was carved out of the Roca

Tarpeya—a rock formation that sits amid the slums of San Agustín and San Pedro in south- central Caracas. The visionary plan for this tropical Babel—developed by the young

Venezuelan architects Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez— included ramps that allowed for the free flow of automobile traffic between its floors and culminated in a geodesic dome on the top floor, which was one of the earliest such structures ever built (figs. 1.9 a-d).30 The chosen site for El Helicoide, moreover,

capitalized on Caracas’ expanding transportation network through its strategic location at

the confluence of a number of important avenues (Victoria, Nueva Granada, Guzmán

Blanco, El Valle, and Presidente Medina Angarita among them) and in close proximity of

the middle-class suburbs of Las Acacias, El Cementerio, and Los Rosales. The introduction of supermarkets and shopping malls such as the one proposed for the complex

mirrored North American examples and generated important modifications to the ways in

which Venezuelans accessed the staples of modernity. These streamlined spaces could

more rapidly, orderly, and inexpensively satisfy the expanding appetite of upwardly mobile consumers.31 Like its predecessors in the U.S. the shopping center at El Helicoide

30 First used for a planetarium in Germany in 1926, geodesic domes were popularized only after the North American neo-futuristic architect R. Buckminster Fuller (1895−1983) developed an engineering system of continuous tension and discontinuous compression that allowed for the deployment of a lightweight lattice of interlocking icosahedrons skinned with a protective cover.

31 González Casas, “Nelson A. Rockefeller,” 197.

resolutely merged into a single structure two of the pillars upon which Venezuelan modernity was erected: personal displacement through automobile travel and capitalistic consumption.

The city that fully materialized under Pérez Jiménez, of which El Helicoide is a crowning example, became a bastion for a modern functionalist architectural spirit that was, essentially, based on the search for a constructive rationality. Oil revenue allowed

Venezuelans to ferociously consume functionalism through the work of a roster of local32 and international modernists such as Oscar Niemeyer (Brazil, 1907−2012) (figs. 1.10 a- d),33 Richard Neutra (Austria/United States, 1892−1970),34 Giὸ Ponti (Italy, 1891−1979),35

32 Some of the local architectural firms whose work was in the functionalist vein included Carbonell y Sanabria; Vegas y Galia; Ferris, Ferrero y Tamayo; Benacerraf y Vestuti; and Carpio y Suárez. See: William Niño Araque, Pedro Mendoza, and Fundación Corp. Group, 1950. El espíritu moderno (Caracas: Fundación Corp Group Centro Cultural, 1998), 85−104.

33 On September 1955, amidst great fanfare and appropriately in the middle of the IX Congreso Panamericano de Arquitectura held in Caracas, it was announced that the Brazilian architect had beaten Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Giὸ Ponti in the commission of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Caracas. Niemeyer’s designs from 1955−56 call for an inverted pyramidal structure that seemed to levitate from its dramatic location perched atop a hill in the Colinas de Bello Monte sector of the city. The project folded with the deteriorating political and economic climate that culminated in the January 23, 1958 coup d’état. More than forty years later, however, traces of the Niemeyer’s unrealized vision for the MAMC are echoed in the dramatic architecture and scenery of the MAC Niterói just across the bay from Rio de Janeiro (completed in 1996).

34 Neutra’s firm, Neutra & Alexander, unsuccessfully submitted a bid for the central redevelopment of Caracas in the fifties. Neutra, however, realized at least one architectural project in Caracas: the Gonzales- Gorrondona House at Avenida de la Linea 65 in Sabana Grande (1962). See: Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 213, 273.

35 Ponti executed two commissions in Caracas: the now demolished Blanca Arreaza Villa—also known as the Diamond House, owing to the bold geometric schemes Ponti applied throughout the house and in the furniture he designed for the house—and the landmark Villa Planchart for Anala and Armando Planchart. See: Giὸ Ponti, “A ‘Florentine’ villa. House for Anala and Armando Planchart in Caracas. Gio Ponti in the Studio Ponti Fornaroli Rosselli,” Domus (Milan) 375 (February 1961). Available online at Domus, accessed June 5, 2014, http://www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-archive/2011/02/02/villa-planchart- caracas-1953-57.html.

and even Le Corbusier (Switzerland/France, 1887−1965).36 Through their commissions,

Caracas became a city of capitalism and expansion conceptually aligned with values that, at least in the United States, justified suburban sprawl and decreased density in the urban areas. The private and public commissions that these and other architects completed— including Ponti’s Villa Planchart (1953−57), which is the crowning example of midcentury residential design in Venezuela (figs. 1.11 a-d)—heralded an emerging social Utopia characterized by North American patterns of urban expansion, the presence of the mainstays of European architectural modernity, and the adaptation of these spatial and physiognomic models to uniquely local conditions.

An undervalued aspect of Caracas’ significant transformation during the middle decades of the twentieth century is the vital role that U.S. petroleum companies, architects, and urban planners played in reshaping the urban landscape during that period.37 After

36 For a reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s 1951 design of the unrealized funerary chapel for Colonel Carlos Delgado-Chalbaud, the assassinated president of the Venezuelan military junta, see: Alejandro Lapunzina, “The Pyramid and the Wall: An Unknown Project of Le Corbusier in Venezuela,” arq: architectural research quarterly 5, issue 3 (September 2001): 255−67.

37Almandoz and fellow architectural historians Luis González Casas and Henry Vicente have tracked how from the 1870s until the late thirties and forties, Venezuelans longed to implement a Eurocentric approach to urbanism. However, by the middle decades of the twentieth century as petroleum exploitation escalated and Venezuela joined the U.S.-led crusade against communism, there was a marked shift towards North American models of development and urban expansion. By Almandoz, see the previously cited “La americanización venezolana” as well as “Urbanización, modernidad urbanística y crítica intelectual en la Venezuela de mediados del siglo XX,” Argos (Caracas: Universidad Simón Bolívar) 34 (June 2001): 45−80; “Longing for Paris. The European-oriented dream of Caracas urbanism (1870s-1930s),” Planning Perspectives 14, no. 3 (July 1999): 225−48; “Europeísmo y modernidad de la élite caraqueña (1870-1940),” L'Ordinaire Latinoaméricain (Toulouse: IPEALT, Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail) 167 (January−March 1997): 59−66; or “European urbanism in Caracas (1870s-1930s),” Planning History (Birmingham: International Planning History Society) 18, no. 2 (1996): 14−19. By González Casas, refer to: “Modernity and the City: Caracas 1935−1958,” (PhD. diss., Cornell University, 1996) and well as the previously cited “Modernity for import and export.” By Henry Vicente, see: “La arquitectura corporativa del petróleo en Caracas,” paper read at the XXIst International Congress of History of Science, Mexico City (October 2001) and “LA ARQUITECTURA URBANA DE LAS CORPORACIONES PETROLERAS: conformación de ‘Distritos Petroleros’ en Caracas durante las décadas de 1940 y 1950,” Espacio Abierto (Universidad del Zulia) 12, no. 3 (July−September, 2003): 391−413.

decades of itinerancy between their established oil camps along Lake Maracaibo and their

satellite offices in Caracas, a dynamic that Henry Vicente branded a “subterranean”

presence, North American oil conglomerates undertook the massive redevelopment of

entire sectors of the city into so-called “oil districts” beginning in the forties and fifties.38

Oil companies financed the construction of permanent corporate headquarters, residential compounds, country clubs, hospitals, and other spaces through which an emerging

Venezuelan middle class gained access to the “modern” lifestyle and social practices of foreign expatriate workers. These neighborhoods sprung up along the southern banks of

the Guaire River (Caracas’ main thoroughfare for waste water) and were anchored by

several major projects. These included the Edificio Creole (1947−54) at Urbanización Los

Chaguaramos (fig. 1.12), designed by the New York architect Lanthrop Douglass (c.

1908−81) who was responsible for a number of commissions for the Standard Oil Company

of New Jersey and its subsidiaries; the former Shell Caribbean Petroleum Corp. offices at

San Bernardino (1946−50), by the New York-based firm Badgeley & Bradbury; and the

Sucre building, headquarters of Mobil Oil Corporation at La Floresta (c. 1950s), by San

Francisco’s Donald (Don) Hatch and Associates.39 The river, which had previously

38 Vicente, “LA ARQUITECTURA URBANA,” 391.

39 Other notable architectural commissions awarded to U.S. firms and financed by petroleum interests include: the Hotel Ávila (Harrison & Abramovitz, New York) at San Bernardino (1942); Valle Arriba Golf Club (John R. Van Kleeck, New York, 1942); Teatro Junín (John & D. Eberson, New York, with the Venezuelan architecture and construction firm Velutini & Bergamín C.A.), at El Silencio (1950); Hatch’s US Embassy Building (La Floresta, 1957), Las Mercedes Commercial Center (1955), and the NCR building at Colinas de Monte Bello (1959); the Hotel Tamanaco (Holabird & Root & Burgee, Chicago, with Venezuelan architect Gustavo Guinard van der Valls, 1953); and the Hipódromo La Rinconada (Arthur B. Froehlich & Associates, Beverly Hills, CA with landscape architecture by Roberto Burle Marx of Brazil, 1957).

designated Caracas’ southern limits, now served as an important marker separating these

new “modern” petroleum districts from older traditional neighborhoods. Like the rural petroleum camps that preceded them, the urban “oil districts” inaugurated new residential prototypes, consumption patterns, and forms of social organization, influencing fashion, leisure, sports and even diet among its domestic and international residents.

From the fifties to well into the seventies, a significant number of European and

North American media outlets focused their attention on Venezuela’s new-found

prosperity and the phenomenal transformations that it prompted.40 Newsreels produced by

the British Pathé News agency (a division of Warner Pathé News), for example, helped to

spread the notion of Venezuela as a modern-day promised land, a veritable Utopia where

transformative architectural, infrastructure, and urbanistic commissions could indeed be

realized.41 These newsreels promoted a cosmopolitan representation of Caracas as

Venezuela’s “City of Tomorrow,” its “Utopia City” (figs. 1.13 a-b) that sharply contrasted

with the city’s actual view of its urban reality. The narrator of “City of Tomorrow” (1954)

recounted regarding Villanueva’s Urbanización 23 de Enero (1954−57) (fig. 1.14): “A

tremendous two-year building project in Venezuela is nearly completed.” With awe, the

clip marveled at the speed at which the superbloques were erected and the complex’s

40 For more on this critical period, see Niño Araque et al., 1950. El espíritu moderno, 21.

41 Titles included: “Venezuela’s City of Tomorrow” (1954), “Super Highway Opens in Andes of Venezuela” (1953−54), “Venezuela’s ‘Utopia’ City” (1954), “Huge Iron Mine Opens in Venezuela” (1954), “Venezuela. Oil Revenue Makes the Desert Bloom−World’s Biggest Earth Dam” (1956), “Venezuela Cashes In” (1958), and “Extra! Caracas: The Swinging City of Venezuela” (1969). These and other similar clips are accessible through the online archives of British Pathé, accessed June 13, 2014, http://www.britishpathe.com.

enormous promise as a social experiment: “from a vast slum area this fine new district has

arisen [with] huge blocks of rentals all built in a super modern style [that] can house six

and a half thousand people and rent from ten shillings a week.”42 However, the complex’s

commanding presence and supposed amelioration of quality of life, health, and morality

issues that it was causally linked to during the period, continued to clash sharply with the

vernacular scale and chaotic rhythms of the original densely populated organic suburbs of

the working class that such structures were meant to replace.43

Another British Pathé newsreel, “Venezuela Cashes In” (1957−58), captures the

wonderment expressed in many of these illustrated features. On the development of the

city of Puerto Ordaz (in the Orinoco River basin), an awesome “industrial complex arising

in the heart of [Venezuela’s] wilderness,” it proclaimed: “While some oil countries spend

their revenue on adding to the royal stock of concubines and Cadillacs, Venezuela believes

in putting her prosperity on firm foundations.”44 For the observant international

community, Venezuela had succeeded in transforming itself into a Latin American

Morgenstadt, into the land of capitalistic promise as Edward Ward, 7th Viscount Bangor,

wrote about in The New El Dorado of 1957:

42 British Pathé News, “Venezuela’s ‘Utopia’ City,” December 1954 (film 493.04), British Pathé archives, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.britishpathe.com/video/venezuelas-utopia-city/query/ venezuela.

43 A period document by Agustín Blanco Muñoz mentioned how Villanueva’s project for the 23 de Enero development symbolized a first instance for the “…liberación del hombre de la miseria, el atraso y la ignorancia…” See Agustín Blanco Muñoz, Habla el General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (Caracas: Editorial José Martí, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1983), 334.

44 British Pathé News, “Venezuela Cashes In,” July 1958 (film 1537.03), British Pathé archives, accessed January 21, 2015, http://www.britishpathe.com/video/venezuela-cashes-in/query/venezuela.

The face of Caracas seemed to have changed even during my short absence. Two blocks of apartments on the hills had gone up another storey [sic] or two [in the days that I was away]. Streets I had driven on before had been closed for widening.45

The book’s cover itself establishes a visual relationship between the promise that functionalist edifices and massive infrastructure improvements, such as the viaduct along the Caracas to La Guaira expressway, afforded to average Venezuelans emblematized by the couple on the lower right-hand corner (fig. 1.15). Yet if these projects provided the structural support for Venezuelan modernity, they also contributed to the spatial fragmentation of entire sectors including the ranchitos (or shantytowns) photographed by

Daniel González and published in Asfalto-Infierno (1963) (fig. 1.16) whose inhabitants remained firmly rooted in the pre-modern conditions of the developing world. The widening socioeconomic divide triggered by petroleum relegated these and other

Venezuelans to areas outside of the country’s advancing architectural grid and rendered its sites of modernity off limits to them.

A Blinding Gesamtkunstwerk

During the fifties, the Venezuelan visual arts field underwent a transformation that rivaled, in its brevity and significance, the process by which the country assimilated its role as a technologically and architecturally modern nation. When Pérez Jiménez assumed power on December 1952, the principal arts institutions in Caracas including the Museo de

Bellas Artes (est. 1938), and the Salón Oficial (first held in 1940) were strongholds of

45 Edward Ward, Seventh Viscount Bangor, The New El Dorado. Venezuela (London: Robert Hale Limited, 1957), 148.

European academism. The country remained out-of-step with the latest abstract movements coming out of Paris and New York. Even the artists associated with the Taller

Libre de Arte (TLA, 1948−52), which the late Cuban critic and head of the Pan American

Union’s Visual Arts Section José Gómez Sicre (1916−91) helped to establish, remained formally conservative.46 Alejandro Otero’s (1921−90) breakthrough transitional series Las

Cafeteras (1946−49) (fig. 1.17), for example, was timid in its intuitive abstraction of

coffeepots and other household objects. For Otero, Mateo Manaure (b. 1926), and Pascual

Navarro (1923−86) (fig. 1.18) their radical aesthetics came slightly later, during their time

in Europe. The three settled in France around 1948 and, in 1950, established the group Los

Disidentes alongside painters Jesús Rafael Soto (1923−2005), Perán Erminy, and Narciso

Debourg (b. 1925), and philosophy student J.R. Guillent Pérez (1923−1989). From their namesake periodical (5 issues appeared in 1950), Los Disidentes actively questioned the inadequacy of existing cultural and artistic structures in Venezuela. At the root of their complaints was the “outdated” teaching program at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y

Aplicadas (EAPA) in Caracas, a position similar to TLA’s earlier critique of the

Venezuelan establishment. Los Disidentes also adopted a critical attitude toward the blinders that sustained the School of Caracas’ brand of “bastard Impressionism”47 which,

46 Marta Traba referred to the landscapes, portraits, and still-life that were produced by Taller artists as “modestas obras de ‘género’ que respondían, sin el menor espíritu subversivo, a las expectativas de una pequeña burguesía todavía arcádica, habitante de un valle incontaminado.” Marta Traba, “Venezuela, cómo se forma una plástica hegemónica,” RE-VISTA (del arte y la arquitectura en Colombia) (Medellín) 1, no. 1 (April-June, 1978), 5. For more on the Taller Libre de Arte and Gómez Sicre’s involvement, see Michael G. Wellen, “Pan-American Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948-1976,” (PhD. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2012), 107−13.

47 Carlos González Bogen, “La escuela ‘de los paisajistas’ de Caracas,” Los Disidentes (Paris), no. 2 (April 1950), 2−3, 2. ICAA Digital Archive no. 813695.

in later years, the ballenero Dámaso Ogaz would refer to as “taxidermy.”48 The group opted to cast off all regionalist traditions and, rather than eschewing European axiology, proposed an internationalized contemporaneity as the defining value of their innovative aesthetic practice.49

In Paris, Los Disidentes encountered an artistic environment that, as the

Argentinean critic Marta Traba (1923−83)—who spent much of 1974 and the 1977−78 period in Caracas—noted, was already infiltrated by the “North American technological dream.” There, they stared in the face of an unprecedented type of reliance: “a dependency

towards the future (assuming, of course, the future of developed countries as if it were their

own).”50 Much in the same way that the architects and urban planners of Caracas’

48 That is to say, the work of those conforming intellectuals that rather than embark on transformative work opted to deal in dead matter. As per Ogaz, these were tractable thinkers whom the establishment could use for maintaining the status quo. Dámaso Ogaz, “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico,” La ballena y lo majamámico, by Dámaso Ogaz, No. 2 of colección docencia ballenera (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1967), n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 35, box 15); also in Rama, Antología, 206−217.

49 Pascual Navarro wrote in “Los disidentes y sus críticos,” which appeared on the fifth issue of Los Disidentes, of how the group mistrusted the blind alleys of a national school that continued to rely on outmoded referents, asserting instead their generational will to adopt universal values. Ironically, the members of Los Disidentes were among an initial generation of middle-class Venezuelans to benefit from generous scholarship programs initiated during the perezjimenato. Funded by oil revenue, government support allowed a significant number of students to expand their horizons through training in Europe and in the United States. In 1950, art critic and historian Alfredo Boulton (1908−90) disdained the warlike stance adopted by Los Disidentes and other Venezuelan scholarship students in Paris. Boulton considered it an irresponsible act, given that their time in Europe was funded by the government and, as such, he maintained, the position was best served by refraining from opinions on the national situation. See: Pascual Navarro, “Los disidentes y sus críticos,” Los Disidentes (Paris), no. 5 (September 1950): 10−12; Alfredo Boulton, “Carta a Alejandro Otero, [Caracas, 15 noviembre de 1961],” in He vivido por los ojos: correspondencia Alejandro Otero-Alfredo Boulton, 1946-1974, ed. Ariel Jiménez (Caracas: Fundación Alberto Vollmer/Museo Alejandro Otero, 2001), 175−77. ICAA Digital Archive no. 813952 and no. 850274, respectively.

50 “Los venezolanos, siguiendo la vieja ruta de los respetos coloniales latinoamericanos, van a París, pero París está infiltrado por el sueño tecnológico americano, al que Shöfer y Vasarely (dos húngaros) darán carta de ciudadanía francesa. En París los disidentes venezolanos protagonizan una nueva forma de dependencia cultural no prevista hasta ese momento, como es la dependencia del futuro (asumiendo, desde luego, el futuro de los países desarrollados, como si fuera propio).” Traba, “Venezuela,” 6.

physiognomic transformation aligned themselves with European and North American ideals, Los Disidentes offered a Latin American response to a global crisis during the postwar period through direct engagement with the precepts and temporalities of the

West—European abstraction in particular.51 To wit, Los Disidentes assumed its own

“Occidentalism,” to quote Fernando Coronil, by inscribing their practices within the parameters of international aesthetic and literary currents.52 Operating from Paris, artists such as Otero and Soto (fig. 1.19) developed abstract practices that shunned the continental concerns of many of their Latin American contemporaries in favor of more universal languages. This aspect of Los Disidentes’ practice set a significant precedent for groups such as El Techo de la Ballena who in later years adapted international tendencies and points of reference in their own commentaries on Venezuelan conditions. Yet, as will be seen in the second section of this dissertation (chapters 3 to 5), El Techo’s insistence on

51 Megan A. Sullivan considered the problems of historical continuity and universality as central to the individual abstract projects of Tomás Maldonado (Argentina, b. 1922), Lygia Clark (Brazil, 1920−88), and Alejandro Otero. In the context of accelerated state-driven developmentalism and the emergence of populist politics, these artists envisioned abstraction as a tool to contribute to or disrupt newly emerging forms of collectivity. As she argues, in the period between WWII and the Cuban Revolution, the rise and fall of South American abstraction tethered between catching up with universal historical narratives and abandoning the pipe dream. Megan A. Sullivan, “Locating Abstraction: the South American Coordinates of the Avant-Garde, 1945−1959” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2013).

52 Through his postcolonial approach, Coronil countered the representational practice that he called Occidentalism [vis-à-vis Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979)] through which the West cast as marginal to it societies that were central to its own formation. That is to say, the “implicit conception of the West [as the self-made embodiment of modernity] animating its representation of non-Western societies [as its antithesis, its Other].” This perspective, as Coronil noted, did not entail a reversal of focus from “Orient to Occident, from Other to Self” but rather called attention to the historical connections between the West and its Margins and recognized them as “bounded entities [that were] in fact historical outcomes of connected peoples.” Occidentalism, in Coronil’s estimation, was not the reverse of Orientalism, but rather its condition of possibility. Coronil, The Magical State, 14.

anchoring their proposals in the past opposed the blinding cult of the future espoused by a number of Venezuelan artists since Los Disidentes.

So strong was the pull of the universal in Venezuela during the de facto years of the perezjimenato that the Utopian artistic tendencies of geometric-abstraction and kinetic art threatened to become co-opted by cohesive discourse articulating a representational system where several sectors of Venezuelan society could converge.53 Already by the seventies, the ever antagonistic Traba argued that these tendencies had become so engrained in Venezuela by the critical 1953−58 period that they were thought to best embody the will for modernity that was shared, at this time, by significant sectors within the economic and political elites in the country.54 In her opinion, kinetic art and geometric- abstraction projected onto the global stage an “ordered” view of Venezuela that masked an unsettling and chaotic landscape that indiscriminately shifted from “the focus of contamination that is the Guaire River, decorative horses, or Cruz-Diez’s

Physichromies.”55

53 Also at play was the manipulation of symbols derived from a set of so-called “national” values extracted from Venezuela’s traditional history, folklore, and music. Fredy Rincón Noriega has noted that such an element of coercion had also been indispensable for holding Pérez Jiménez’s government in place. It was achieved through a repressive police apparatus that kept the “peace” and “tranquility” necessary in the implementation of his ambitions plans as well to guarantee a criterion of internal order mandated by the United States’ hemispheric policies during the Cold War. See Rincón N[oriega], El Nuevo Ideal Nacional, 46−69.

54 On the specific problem of kinetic entrenchment in Venezuela, see two texts where she calls attention to the predicament of “los quemados”—those artists, like Cornelis Zitman and Oswald Vigas, whose against the grain work is of little consequence to the national market and mainstream: Marta Traba, Cornelis Zitman, exh. cat. (Caracas: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, August 1976), 5−7 [ICAA Digital Archive no. 1167924] and Oswaldo Vigas/Pinturas 1943−1973 (Bogotá: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, May-June 1973) [ICAA Digital Archive no. 1106962].

55 “[La sociedad venezolana mayoritaria] conoce [a esa tendencia hegemónica] por la proliferación de obras públicas implantadas en diversos edificios de Caracas y la acepta como parte extravagante de un

The prominence afforded to the holy trinity of the cinéticos [Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez

(b. 1923) (fig. 1.20), and Otero] in many of the epoch’s most important international

exhibitions—including Le Mouvement (April 1955) and Mouvement 2 (December

1964−February 1965) (fig. 1.21), both organized by Galerie Denise René in Paris, or The

Museum of Modern Art’s The Responsive Art in 1965 (figs. 1.22 a-b)—certainly

underscored a Venezuelan proximity in focus, influences, aesthetics and/or theoretical

underpinnings to Euro-America.56 These explicit links were undeniable and even

expected: Otero, Cruz-Diez, and Soto each kept studios and resided in Paris for most of

their lives. From there they made important advances in chromatic theory, color

perception, and the redefinition of the roles of the work and the viewer, respectively. That

is to say, they had European experience and credentials that served them well in promoting

Venezuela. But the fact that their production often escaped national expectations and was,

rather, directly rooted in French visual developments is often downplayed. Without

negating these artists’ own political convictions and aversion to being typecast into a

constructivist mold,57 their seamless (impeccable by many accounts) cosmopolitanism has,

paisaje perturbador y caótico que alterna indiscriminadamente, en el foco de contaminación que es el río Guaire, caballitos decorativos o fisiciromías de Cruz-Diez.” See: Traba, “Venezuela,” 9.

56 The British critic and scholar Guy Brett presupposed this shared tradition as well as established the centrality of certain Latin American cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, for example) within the international avant-garde. Guy Brett, “A Radical Leap,” in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820- 1980, ed. Dawn Ades (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 253−83.

57 Otero and Soto were life-long supporters of issues of social justice and democracy although their personal politics never fully carried over to their seemingly apolitical work. Both of them realized that the impetus for their art making should be to change, as much as possible, the basic mechanisms that conditioned communication. From about 1959 to the early sixties, Cruz-Diez joined them in experimented with Informalism and, to varying degrees, rebelled against the entrenchment of geometric-abstraction among certain circles. Beginning in the early to mid-sixties, moreover, all of them shifted their attention to increasingly more participatory work that depended on the viewers’ physical behavior and reflection. Although their varied body of work shared with previous series the overarching vocabulary of geometric

perhaps, pressingly obscured more interesting lines of inquiry in Venezuela that remained

inexorably rooted in national actuality.58

The perceived affinity with and aperture towards Western cultural models that permeated the Venezuelan cultural sector reached its moment of greatest visibility with the

completion of Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s campus for the Universidad Central de Venezuela

(hereafter cited as UCV) in 1958. The construction and name of the Ciudad Universitaria, as it is colloquially known, coincided with a similar project for Mexico City’s UNAM

(1952−53). The UCV compound was the key emblem for Venezuela’s ambitious and substantive architectural transformation at midcentury. Yet it also illustrated the changing face of Venezuelan modern architectural design and aesthetics between 1944, when construction began under the government of Isaías Medina Angarita, and its completion during the final year of Pérez Jiménez’s military dictatorship. From an initial phase of landscape-oriented architecture and the same sort of vernacular aestheticism that had been at the core of Los Disidentes’ critique, the campus culminated in a final period dominated by functionalism and geometric-abstraction that coincided with the widespread adoption of these modalities as signposts for Venezuelan modernity.

abstraction, underlying these new pieces was a common concern to reveal the potential for action carried out by viewers.

58 Recent examples of this monolithic characterization of twentieth-century Venezuelan art include, among others, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, ed., The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin; New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University: 2007); Juan Ledezma, ed., The Sites of Latin American Abstraction (Miami: Charta, 2007); Mary Kate O’Hare, ed., Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s–50s (Newark: Newark Museum, 2010); Embracing Modernity: Venezuelan Geometric Abstraction (Miami: Frost Art Museum, 2010); and Cold America: Geometric Abstraction in Latin America (1934–1973) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011).

Ciudad Universitaria, moreover, was perhaps the concluding chapter of a national modernizing process where spatial politics, social science, and aesthetics converged. Here

Villanueva had carte blanche to develop his own conception of a Gesamtkunstwerk that

proposed an “integration of the arts” unifying architecture, design, and the visual arts in

comprehensive structures that he viewed, from an Euro-centric perspective, as expansive

architectural-sculptural-pictorial organisms.59 Although locally understood as an original

concept, the Synthesis of the Arts (known also by slightly different names, integración plástica among them), which was the premise for the architect’s integrative approach, had

had wide circulation in Europe since the nineteenth century. The German composer

Richard Wagner (1813−83), to cite a key example, utilized the related notion of

Gesamtkuntwerk (or the total work of art).60 At stake was a comprehensive model of

modernism that combined spatial, social, and scientific elements. It had a distinct

manifestation in early nineteenth-century France by a group of rogue architects working

from the Institut de France’s Villa Medici in Rome from 1899 to 1909, from which derived

a universalizing discourse that circulated in Latin America particularly after WWII.61 And,

59 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, El problema de la integración (Caracas: Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1980), 70−71. A longer version of the essay, titled La integración de las artes, was published in 1966 (Lima: Facultad de Arquitectura, Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería).

60 In a series of essays (including “Art and Revolution” and “The Artwork of the Future”) published in 1849, Wagner argued against the fragmentation of the arts advocating, instead, for the total integration of music and drama into a new revolutionary form of opera. See Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, and other works, trans. W. Ashton Ellis (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). The term was first used in 1827 by the late-romantic German theologian Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff (1782–1863). See: Alfred R. Neumann, “The Earliest Use of the Term Gesamtkunstwerk,” Philological Quarterly 35, no. II (April 1956): 191–93.

61 They came together at the Villa Medici to produce a series of models of urban form that, as Paul Rabinow notes of this conjunctural moment, moved “beyond the individual building to the city as an object to be harmoniously ordered, and beyond the primacy of aesthetically dictated principles of order.” Working from Rome, architects including Tony Garnier (1869−1948), Ernest Hébrard (1875–1933), and Henri Prost

it was later applied to architecture by Walter Gropius (1883−1969) as the defining tenet of the Staatliches Bauhaus (1919−33) just as the German zeitgeist turned from emotional

Expressionism to a matter-of-fact New Objectivity. Moreover, as Nicola Pezolet notes in the context of postwar France, the Synthesis of the Arts was linked to both modern art and a welfare state notion of public space and its “correlative rhetoric of beauty, hygiene, functionability and accessibility.”62 Developed during a period of economic contraction,

the German strain reconciled individual productivity with a new attitude of practical engagement with the world that, ironically, was intrinsically understood as a North

American asset. It was this latter conception, which also softened the ideological

contradictions between capitalist liberalism and socialist planning, that Gropius

proselytized from his teaching posts at Harvard Graduate School of Design and MIT

following his exile from Nazi Germany in 1937.63 Having spent his formative years in

both France and the United States, Villanueva may have very well been informed by both

schools. Emerging from within a national all-encomapssing drive to modernize the country, his conception the Synthesis of the Arts incorporated both the French modern art-

(1874−1959) seceded from the academic program at the Villa Medici in conceiving architectural and urbanistic interventions of heightened social and historical consequence. See Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 211−50, 211. For an examination of the collaborative efforts of several individuals (Le Corbusier) and groups (Groupe Espace) that applied a synthesis of the arts approach in Reconstruction-era France, see: Nicola Pezolet, “Spectacles Plastiques: Reconstruction and the Debates on the ‘Synthesis of the Arts’ in France, 1944−1962,” (PhD. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013).

62 Ibid., 11.

63 The Bauhaus’s modernist approach stressed teamwork, sought to merge the fine and applied arts, espoused the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit. It also proposed radically simplified forms, rationality, and functionality in their designs. On Gropius and his understanding of the Bauhaus, see: Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

welfare state dyad and the ideologies of free enterprise and functionalism associated with

the German model.

As in previous urban projects including the overhaul of the El Silencio residential

district in Caracas (1943−45) (figs. 1.23 a-c), Villanueva proposed to enjoin colonial and

modern architecture.64 However, at Ciudad Universitaria, the connection was not literal or implied through the formal architectural references of his prior work; but rather, as Ariel

Jiménez has noted, it was made through his choice for structural solutions.65 Villanueva

arrived at his general plan for the university through the adoption of a classic formal

structure where buildings and gardens were organized symmetrically around a pronounced

central axis, the Conjunto Central (fig. 1.24), intended to direct mundane comings and

goings in a manner akin to that of the emblematic town plazas of colonial Latin America.

Yet, the functionalist language that Villanueva employed in the design of the buildings

themselves significantly departed from some colonial architectural modes previously used

at El Silencio and other earlier projects.

During this first phase of the campus (1944−49), the architect brought in mostly

local artists, such as Francisco Narváez (1905−82) who had designed the “Las Toninas” fountain at the Plaza O’Leary in El Silencio (see fig. 1.23a). Narváez created a suite of

64 On July 25, 1942, General Isaías Medina Angarita ordered the complete demolition of the colonial sector of El Tartagal, renamed El Silencio after all of its inhabitants succumbed to a plague, that by the 1940s had deteriorated into a crime and disease-ridden shantytown. The Reurbanización El Silencio that emerged along seven city blocks under Villanueva’s vision, and with the collaboration of the sculptor Francisco Narváez, is one of the earliest social laboratories in modern Venezuela.

65 Jiménez, “The Challenge of the Times,” Boulton and his Contemporaries, 156−295, 159−160.

allegorical sculptures that made reference to some of the overarching principles of the

university, including La educación [Education] (fig. 1.25) and La ciencia [Science] both

from 1950. Villanueva’s structurally pure architectural language and Narváez’s stylized

sculptural group were, as Jiménez has recognized, clearly disconnected.66

By the early fifties, as the second and third stages of Ciudad Universitaria were

underway during the worst years of repression by the government’s Seguridad Nacional

[National Security or secret police], Villanueva’s architectural language became more

open, more fluid, and his choice of materials wider, including the adoption of raw or

unadorned reinforced concrete (figs. 1.26 a-b). Moreover, there was a greater conceptual

alignment between his new formal strategies and the artists selected for the complex. The

architect abandoned paint as the preferred method for the adornment of the walls in favor of more organic and richer Venetian tile in vogue throughout the fifties. Its use gave color a heightened importance to the extent that the laboriousness of the application process highlighted the texture of brand-new finishing materials. Paralleling this marked shift, his vision for the outright “integration of the arts” came through the artists he invited to Ciudad

Universtaria, which (beginning in 1951) included some of the most relevant exponents of international constructivism.

The synthesis, as Villanueva noted in reference to this second phase, was achieved because “a single concept permeates the world of the plastic arts,” and “the same philosophy runs through [the architecture and the artworks].”67 Venezuelan artists,

66 Ibid., 160.

67 Villanueva, “The Problem of Integration,” in Ibid., 197−98.

including disidentes Manaure and Otero, created some of the UCV’s hallmark works during this time, most notably the former’s emblematic red, white and blue tile mural for the exterior of the covered plaza (fig. 1.27) and the latter’s sinuous design for the School of Engineering (fig. 1.28). Villanueva did not establish any hierarchies between the work of these local geometric abstractionists and that of such international luminaries as

Alexander Calder (1898−1976)—whose Acoustic Clouds (1952−53) (fig. 1.29) is one of the best known individual works in the entire complex—, Jean (Hans) Arp (1886−1966),

Victor Vassarely (1906−97), Antoine Pevsner (1886−1962), and Fernand Léger

(1881−1955). Indeed, Villanueva’s integrative tactics (if not strategies) worked during this final period because he created the spaces in light of the artists that he had in mind and worked as a team to develop them.68 Even Narvaéz’s seemingly anachronistic work

underwent transformations: his large-scale sculpture El atleta [The Athlete] (1952) for the

UCV stadium (fig. 1.30) was a better fit with Villanueva’s proposed fusion than La

educación. Indeed, it was constructed on-site out of pre-fabricated concrete modules, akin

to those used in the stadium that it flanks, and in a markedly more abstract language than

his earlier work.

The integrated architectural and artistic elements at Ciudad Universitaria jointly

increased the social consequence of the site among those who experienced it while

reflecting a unity with this indispensable human content. It therefore demonstrated how

68 Calder’s Acoustic Clouds, for example, both responded to and resolved specific architectural problems posed by Villanueva. The work’s twenty two wooden tiles actually do much more than lyrically float over the ceiling of the Aula Magna. Through their counter-plating with about half inch of steel, they actually addressed and improved the less than optimal acoustics of the auditorium.

Villanueva successfully adapted the fundamental precepts of the Synthesis of the Arts to a local environment.69 Yet, irrespective of the architect’s wager in linking international modern art to a consolidated public urban space that could be both modern and national at the same time, the complex soon became another area of rationalization and privilege that demarcated a new segregated social reality for Venezuelans. Indeed, this became the fundamental problem at the crux of El Techo’s proposals of the next decade. Much in the same way that petroleum-funded architectural interventions along the Guaire River divided

Caracas along socioeconomic lines, the UCV campus established a divide that rested upon those who had access to higher education and those whose condition precluded them from pedagogical advancement.70 At the same time, Ciudad Universitaria signaled the definitive end of Europe’s cultural and scientific hegemony in the region and became the pacesetter of North America’s cultural consolidation in Venezuela.

The Undoing of Order

The final years of Pérez Jiménez’s rule were marked by the unstable relationships between the international petroleum conglomerates, its agents within the National State, and increasingly more radicalized sectors of the population including the intellectual avant-

69 Villanueva, “The Problem of Integration,” 197−98.

70 Certainly, as Fabiola López-Durán has observed in light of the French model of the Synthesis of the Arts that was popular in both Mexico and Venezuela, “architecture and urbanism have always teetered between equality and inequality, between the individual and the collective, even while intending to fortify progress and democracy.” See: Fabiola López-Durán, “Eugenics in the Garden: Architecture, medicine, and urban design from France to Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century,” in A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American & Latino Art, ed. Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Megan Sullivan (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell Press, Blackwell Companions to Art History Series forthcoming), pagination unavailable.

garde and the student and labor movements whose opposition to the imbalance had deep popular roots.71 These conflicts reached a peak on January 23, 1958 when factions from within Venezuela’s National Armed Forces overthrew Pérez Jiménez and called elections for November of that year. This was a momentous time for a wide array of dissenters who witnessed how, in Cuba, Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement was securing a number of offensive triumphs that led to the ousting of dictator Fulgencio Batista (1901−73, in office

1940−44 and again 1952−59) on January 1, 1959. Orlando Araujo noted in 1968 that the

Cuban Revolution (1953−59) presented a “close, concrete, convincing and lasting demonstration that it is indeed possible to free oneself from the imperialist yolk and from the straps of an oligarchy associated with military governments.” Certainly, for the millions of landless peasants in Venezuela,

It [was] such an overwhelming example, so stimulating the lesson and so invincible the power of a people that [stood] behind their revolution that the experience act[ed] on the[ir] conscience…with greater efficacy than any possible explanations, speeches or theories.72

For a wide base of sympathizers among the Venezuelan intellectual class and creative Left, moreover, the Cuban Revolution was an exemplary act of Latin American agency. On the fifth anniversary of the Revolution, the ballenero Caupolicán Ovalles reflected on how war

71 Araujo, Venezuela violenta, 21.

72 “Por la vertiente de las masas están obrando los estímulos históricos, las raíces de la violencia en Venezuela, y obra, también, un factor exógeno importante: el ejemplo triunfante de la revolución cubana, una demostración cercana, concreta, convincente y duradera de que en América Latina es posible liberarse del yugo imperialista y de las coyundas de una oligarquía asociada con gobiernos militaristas para la empresa de explotar a un pueblo. Es tan arrollador el ejemplo, tan estimulante la lección y tan imbatible el poder surgido de la entera identificación de un pueblo con su revolución, que su experiencia actúa sobre la conciencia de las masas populares de América Latina con mayor eficacia que todas las explicaciones, todos los discursos y todas las teorías.” Ibid., 133.

and death, or what he called “the great crusade of our time,” emerged as a transformative locus and creative pathway: “In Cuba,” he wrote, “we observe the revitalized spirit of those who have waged war.”73

These forces were at play in carrying writer Rómulo Betancourt (see fig. 1.4) to

victory in the November 1958 elections under the left-of-center Acción Democrática (or

Partido Socialdemócrata de Venezuela, AD) ticket. Resentment and disillusion, however,

came early on during this second presidential term (1959−64) as it became apparent that he had betrayed the naïve populist ideals that led to a victory at the ballot box.74 The contradictions between Betancourt’s political platform and his continuation of a capitalist economic model were evident:

[Betancourt’s administration] sought to develop a petroleum-based political model but without entering into conflict with the [international] petroleum companies; they sought to consolidate agrarian reform but without entering into conflict with either the latifundistas or the agrarian bourgeoisie; they projected a tax reform that would not conflict with the wealthy; they contrived of an educational reform that promised to reclaim state sovereignty without ruffling the Church or its allies…75

73 “…la muerte es una gran cruzada de nuestro tiempo…Nuestra guerra caracterizó un hecho de creación. No establecemos una finalidad —como tal— para ella en la escritura, pero sí la establecemos como atmósfera ineludible. La violencia es una cosa, la guerra otra. Y como la guerra es para nosotros un hecho creador, ella es un camino de transformación —observamos el revitalizado espíritu de pueblos que han guerreado: Cuba, por ejemplo.” Caupolicán Ovalles, “Contraseñas,” rayado sobre el techo 3: 28; also in Rama, Antología, 67−71.

74 Betancourt had been president briefly between 1945 and 1948 during a period now known as El Trienio Adeco. With Betancourt at the helm, in 1947, the Adecos organized the country’s first elections through which their candidate, novelist Rómulo Gallegos (1884−1969), became the first democratically- elected President of Venezuela. Gallegos took office on February 17, 1948 but was overthrown nine months by a bloodless coup d’état orchestrated by Minister of Defense Carlos Delgado Chalbaud (1909−50), who had, ironically, participated in the coup d’état against Medina Angarita in 1945. For more on the 1945 coup and the Trienio Adeco see Chapter 4, note 28 in particular.

75 “Deseaban hacer una política nacionalista en petróleo, pero sin tener problemas con las petroleras; deseaban hacer una reforma agraria pero sin chocar con los latifundistas ni con la gran burguesía agraria; proyectaban una preforma impositiva, pero sin entrar en conflicto con los sectores del capital; concibieron una ley para rescatar la soberanía estatal de la educación, hoy penetrada por grupos religiosos y sectores

Indeed, as Araujo wrote in Venezuela violenta, Betancourt turned on his popular-based support in choosing paths that preserved the old structures of power and guaranted the widespread privileges of both the traditional elites and the United States. Events including the Bay of Pigs Invasion (April 1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), and the

Brazilian coup d’état of March 31, 1964 further escalated Cold War tensions.76 Such episodes undermined the hegemony and credibility of the United States and the Western

Block in Latin America while further complicating the national panorama in Venezuela.

Such sudden geopolitical shifts sparked violent resistance from the Venezuelan military and engendered new radicalized political groups that eroded the stronghold of

Betancourt’s government. The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), for instance, was established in April 1960 by elements from within Acción Democrática’s

privados, pero dispuestos a evitarse líos con la Iglesia y sus aliados. Puestos en la alternativa de avanzar por el camino de las reformas a fondo, entrando en el inevitable conflicto con los grupos de poder ero fortaleciéndose en el apoyo popular, o la de mantener el apoyo de estos grupos al precio de conservar viejas estructuras y garantizar los privilegios, aquellos hombres escogieron este último camino, creyéndole el más fácil y el que les daría mayor estabilidad en el poder; pero la realidad está demostrando lo contrario…” Araujo, Venezuela violenta, 24.

76 It is now confirmed that the United States’ intelligence apparatus aided the Brazilian military in deposing the left-leaning President João Goulart (1918−76) on April 1, 1964. Vice President Goulart had become president in 1961 following the resignation of Jânio Quadros and amidst fears that his political views were too radical for the position. Goulart opposed sanctions against Cuba and during the Cuban Missile Crisis wrote to John F. Kennedy expressing his concern that the Organization of American States (OAS) was being manipulated “to serve anticommunist and antidemocratic interests” in the Americas. His administration took an independent stance in foreign policy, resumed relations with many socialist countries and, in January 1964, successfully ratified the Lei de Remessa de Lucros [Remittance of Profits Law]—a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could take out of Brazil to the detriment of U.S. interests. See: Ariane Figueiredo, María C. Gaztambide, and Daniela Matera Lins, “Chronology,” in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), 337−404. For declassified materials that shed light on the U.S.’s role in the coup, see: Peter Kornbluh, ed., “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup” (transcript of audio tape “President Johnson urged taking ‘every step that we can’ to support overthrow of Joao Goulart”), National Security Archive, accessed June 22, 2014, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/index.htm.

own youth brigades. These youths channeled their generational and ideological affinities with Fidel Castro, who visited Caracas in January of 1959 on the first anniversary of the fall of Pérez Jiménez. Subsequently, they joined the Partido Comunista de Venezuela

(PCV), the local affiliate of the Communist International with ideological and financial ties to the Soviet Union, in opposing Betancourt’s firm stance against Castro and, particularly, his initiative to exclude the island from the Organization of American States in January

1962.77 That same year, the PCV officially established the militant Frente de Liberación

Nacional (FLN) and its guerilla organization, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional

(FALN), to give organizational structure to a number of preexisting armed foci that were already operating throughout much of the country.78 The neutralization and curtailment of

77 The Cuban government was excluded, but not permanently expelled, “from participation in the inter-American system” through the passing of Resolution VI of the Eighth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, from January 22 to 31, 1962. During the meeting Ministers of Foreign Affairs determined that “adherence by any member of the Organization of American States to Marxism-Leninism [wa]s incompatible with the inter-American system and the alignment of such a government with the communist bloc br[oke] the unity and solidarity of the hemisphere.” See: Permanent Council of the Organizations of American States, General Committee, “AIDE MEMOIRE, THE SITUATION OF CUBA IN THE OAS AND THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, (Presented by the Secretariat for Legal Affairs),” OEA/Ser.G, CP/CG-1527/03 (Washington, DC: Organization of American States, 25 April 2003), 2.

78 Some of these fronts included: La Azulita in Estado Mérida (1960, led by Argimiro Gabaldón); “Frente Simón Bolivar” or “Frente Libertador” in the mountains of Lara (1961, under the command of Gabaldón, Carlos Betancourt, Juan Vincente Cabezas, and Tirso Pinto); “Frente José Leonardo Chirinos” in the mountains of Estado Falcón and Yaracuy (1962, under Douglas Bravo, Luben Petkoff, Elías Manuit Camero and Elegido Sibada); and the “Frente Manuel Ponte Rodríguez (1962, led by Alfredo Maneiro and Héctor Fleming Mendoza). The following fronts became active following the establishment of the FALN under the Political Bureau of the PCV: “Frente José Antonio Páez” in the Llanos de Apure (1963, with leaders including Sgt. Adalberto González of the Venezuelan Navy, Francisco Prada and Ángel María Castillo); the “Frente Ezequiel Zamora” along the Western area of El Bachiller (Estado Miranda) near Caracas (1963, led by Maneiro, Américo Martín, Moisés Moleiro, and Fernando Soto Rojas); and, finally, the “Frente Antonio José de Sucre,” that operated between the states of Sucre, Monagas and Anzoátegui (1966, initially coordinated by the MIR and subsequently by the Bandera Roja/Frente Américo Silva politico-military group under Carlos Betancourt, Américo Silva and Gabriel Puerta Aponte). For more on the consolidation of Venezuela’s revolutionary movement, see Asamblea Nacional República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Documentos del Movimiento Revolucionario Venezolano. 1960-1979, No. 1 of Serie Archivo de la Revolución/Fondo Documental del Pueblo (Caracas: Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura, 2008),

these radical parties and militant cells—which, following the failed coup attempt at

Carúpano (May 4, 1962), were forced underground—became a necessary evil of

Betancourt’s consolidation of democracy.79 “It hurts me—says the Emperor—but I must do it,” Edmundo Aray wrote in Twist presidencial, highlighting the torture and hardline approach that the government adopted at this time.80 Indeed, Betancourt’s “peacekeeping” methods—led by the Minister of the Interior, Justice Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922−2010), who himself would assume the presidency on two occasions (1974−79 and 1989−93)— were as violent and disruptive as the radical right-81 and left-wing insurrections that were staged and thwarted around the country to the detriment of any sort of “democratic” process.

12−17. And for the sociological conditions that gave rise to violence in Venezuela see Araujo, Venezuela violenta.

79 Known as El Carupanazo, this was one of three coups that the PCV, the MIR, and the FALN orchestrated in 1962 with help from within the Armed Forces. The first of these was the military insurrection known as El Barcelonazo on June 26, 1961. The offensive left nearly sixteen people dead and nine wounded and, captured military dissenters, were tried by Military Tribunals and subjected to torture. At Carúpano, the Third Infantry Battalion of the Navy and the 77th Detachment of the National Guard used the local radio station to broadcast statements against Betancourt’s government, accusing the leader of, among other things, depriving people of their democratic rights by dividing the country into “those protected by constitutional guarantees and those unprotected.” The air force bombed Navy headquarters, aimed unwaveringly at land targets from sea, and troops took over the city. Approximately 400 people were detained, including military officers and civilians with ties to the PCV and the MIR, and the two parties were banned. The bloodshed worsened during El Porteñazo. On the morning of June 2, an uprising supported by civilians took place in the naval base of Puerto Cabello. Making no threats, Bentancourt’s government sent air force and army troops to the coastal city where they engaged in full-fledged combat against the rebels. The outcome was devastating: over 400 dead and 700 wounded. See: El Universal, “1962. Rómulo Betancourt’s iron fist,” accessed June 25, 2014, http://www.eluniversal.com/aniversario/100/en_ca8_art_romulo-betancourts_ 01A2251583.

80 “Tortura. Es doloroso —dice El Emperador— pero debo hacerlo.” Aray, Twist presidencial, 142.

81 On June 24, 1960 there was a botched assassination attempt against Betancourt financed by the right-wing dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo.

In their March 25, 1961 foundational manifesto, “Las instituciones de cultura nos roban el oxígeno,” the members of El Techo proclaimed themselves in “frank protest against the country’s ongoing cultural farce, and the continued political and economic mistakes of Venezuelan democracy.” They also criticized a cadre of Venezuela’s “most established national writers” whose literature was limited and characterized by a “crushing superficiality”82 that did not imbricate itself in all that had gone awry in Venezuela by the

sixties.83 Not even the less radical factions within the avant-garde group Sardio (1958−61), who had spent most of the critical 1958−61 period denouncing what they viewed as the compromised values of Venezuelan culture, including geometric-abstraction, could curtail the political belligerency of its most radical subscribers. These included figures such as

Edmundo Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Salvador Garmendia, and Francisco Pérez Perdomo.

Their positions at the time hastened the disintegration of Sardio and led to the foundation of El Techo de la Ballena in 1961.84 Calzadilla wrote in the prologue to a recent anthology on El Techo of how:

82 “No como producto del azar, ni como ocio o actividad de un grupo de intelectuales evadidos o presuntamente inadaptados en el actual engranaje social, sino más bien como un gesto de franca protesta ante la permanente e indeclinable farsa cultural del país y el continuado desacierto político y económico que registra la democracia venezolana, el Techo de la Ballena ha comenzado a poner en evidencia la inveterada mediocridad de nuestro ambiente cultural. Prueba de ello, la exposición que bajo el nombre de ‘Homenaje a la Cursilería’ pudo revelar, a través de textos literarios de los más consagrados escritores nacionales, la aplastante superficialidad que limita y caracteriza a la literatura venezolana.” El Techo de la Ballena, “Las instituciones de cultura nos roban el oxígeno,” La esfera (Caracas), March 25, 1961. Subsequently it was published as “[No como producto del azar…]” along with the group’s “Pre-Manifesto” and text for Para la resitutución del magma, Sardio (Caracas) no. 8 (May-June 1961): 136−38. Translated in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 256−58.

83 That May, the group launched a concerted assault on this problematic omission through the multidisciplinary exhibition Homenaje a la cursilería, which is the topic of Chapter 4 (“The Authority of Kitsch”).

84 Edmundo Aray recounted in a 1999 interview how the alignment of certain members of Sardio with the international Social Democracy movement represented in Venezuela by Acción Democrática

There were those who justified pure abstraction as the derivative fruit of the genealogical tree of modern art; [as a signpost of] absolute contemporaneity; an asymmetrical expression that mirrored [Venezuela’s] technological development. Yet Venezuela was at that time a country crafted out of sweat and tears, groped, underdeveloped…a huge landscape whose inhabitants still suffer[ed] from various decades of exclusion from the engine of progress…Venezuela’s reality was too violent to be typecast into an [abstract-concrete] mold.85

In his view, the universal languages espoused by the cinéticos could not adequately address failing political and economic models. For El Techo, these currents conveyed a questionable sense of Venezuelan cosmopolitanism and whitewashed the realities of a country where the illusion of progress could no longer be sustained. As will be seen in the following chapters, theirs was an oppositional project harboring the potential for an alternative social order based on the chaotic, the organic, and the spontaneous.

(Adeco) complicated relations within the group and let to its demise. Díaz Orozco, “Entrevistas: El Techo de la Ballena treinta años después,” in El mediodía de la modernidad, 115−46, 124−25.

85 “No faltan los teóricos locales, al estilo de Alejandro Otero, que ensayan justificar la abstracción pura que se hace en el país como un fruto derivado en cuarta o quinta generación del árbol genealógico del arte moderno. Una absoluta contemporaneidad como expresión asimétrica y refleja del desarrollo tecnológico. Pero Venezuela era entonces y sigue siéndolo, un país padecido a sudor y lágrimas, manoseado, subdesarrollado, sentido y resentido, con una enorme extensión de su suelo y sus habitantes sumidos en varias décadas de exclusión respecto a la marcha del carro del progreso. El arte abstracto-concreto debía fracasar en su propósito de justificar una función social que era sólo la necesidad del artista de creer en lo que hacía. La realidad demostró que estaba fuera del alcance de sus disparos. Ciertamente, porque la realidad era demasiado violenta para ser abarcada por un molde que le resultaba estrecho, siendo así que para ser expresada tenía que ser primero comprendida, vivida, amada, a dentellada limpia.” Juan Calzadilla, “Prólogo,” xiv−xv.

CHAPTER 2 – BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: INFORMALISM AND THE PASSAGE TO ART TERRORISM

…el Informalismo plantea la necesidad de una libertad total de acción a fin de incorporar a la pintura materias y procedimientos originales que sirvan para elaborar una visión nueva del cosmos.1

—Juan Calzadilla, 1960

** Con la materia se hizo el féretro de la abstracción. El informalismo ha jugado en esta ceremonia el papel de cadáver putrefacto. Enterrarlo a toda prisa es algo menos que un acto humanitario, es una bella necesidad después de la cual se comprueba que estamos entrando en la última etapa de una defunción general de la que el arte abstracto sacará los gastos de un entierro ni pobre ni lujoso. El informalismo ha muerto, para bien o para mal…2

—Juan Calzadilla, 1964

Some of the first creative reactions challenging the scandalous socioeconomics of the late fifties and early sixties Venezuela were expressed by the local adherents of

Informalism, an antidotal movement encompassing a number of non-geometrical abstract

1 Juan Calzadilla, “Presentación: ESPACIOS VIVIENTES,” Espacios vivientes (Maracaibo: Palacio Municipal, February 14−28, 1960), n/p. Coll. Archivos Documentales, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.

2 Calzadilla, “La terrible prueba,” rayado sobre el techo 3: 24−26, 24.

currents that had emerged in the country by the early fifties.3 In itself, the local antagonism

between the abstract rationalization that obscured these conditions and the artistic trends

irradiating from within them was not new. It echoed the opposing genealogies of

abstraction—one utopian, concrete, and rational; the other irreverent, expressionistic, and

open-ended—that Alfred H. Barr, Jr. had outlined in his now famous flowchart on its

development, which was used as the cover illustration for the catalogue of the 1936 MoMA

exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (fig. 2.1).4 Yet, the Venezuelan sociopolitical

landscape at midcentury had created such a viable environment for artistic dissent that, by

the time the polarization emerged there, it reached amazing levels of belligerency between

the opposing camps.

With this context in mind, I propose that Informalism represented an aesthetic

incorporation of a growing national debate clamoring for the anarchistic reversal of the

economic principles that had allowed for the ongoing commodification of nature (the

subsoil) and rationalization of art (constructivism and geometric-abstraction), and all its

related social restrictions. Anchored in George Bataille’s notion of the “accursed share,”

that I refer to as excess, I show how midcentury Venezuela represented a textbook case

3 Calzadilla has stated that the earliest notices of the spread of Informalism in Venezuela date to 1952 when, at the height of the popularity of geometric abstraction, the Maracaibo-based Italian artist Renzo Vestrini (1906−79) shifted his interest from figuration to lyrical abstraction. For his part, Perán Erminy places Vestrini’s informalist incursions more towards 1956. See: Calzadilla in Susana Benko, “La colección Clara Diament Sujo,” in Una visión del arte venezolano 1940−1980. Coleccion Clara Diament Sujo, by Galería de Arte Nacional (Caracas: Galería de Arte Nacional, 1995), 12−23, 15; Perán Erminy, “El arte nuevo en Venezuela,” Sardio (Caracas) 7 (April-May, 1960): 571−80, 571.

4 See Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936). In thinking about Barr’s landmark chronology, Katy Deepwell writes that modernism privileges an “Euro- American model of internationalism across a Paris-New York axis” and that the chart evidences an ongoing hierarchical and exclusionary tradition in modern art. Women Artists and Modernism, ed. Katy Deepwell (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 3−4.

illustrating how the misuse of excessive energy and wealth indeed erupted in uncontrolled

disruptions of the prevailing system (even if they were of little consequence).5 From this perspective, I track the specific conditions that triggered El Techo de la Ballena’s turn away

from Informalism in the 1961−64 period. Irrespective of its initial appeal, the collective’s indivisible tenets of aesthetic and social renovation precluded it from adopting Informalism as its exclusive vocabulary. Ultimately, the trend represented an important, but none-the- less partial, constitutive element in a fluid and multifarious practice that El Techo defined as “art terrorism” early on.6

The Precedents of Venezuelan Informalism

Giulio Carlo Argan (1909−92), one of Italy’s most challenging postwar art critics, has argued that Informalism can be read as a common reaction to a European situation of profound moral despair in which the universal Utopia sought by the historical avant-garde

had lost its meaning. In his view, the tendency represented an attempt to “recompose” a

unified European culture from its dissolute remains following WWII.7 Argan’s doomsday

5 Georges Bataille’s project called for widening the frame of economic inquiry to what he called a general economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but also for social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festivals were important components in pre-capitalist societies such as that the Kwakwaka’wakw people of the Pacific Northwest, Aztec Mexico, and the ancient Islamists and Tibetans. The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce but a desire to unsettle the status quo through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses of generosity, display, and sacrifice. Bataille, The Accursed Share.

6 See Introduction, note 14.

7 Giulio Carlo Argan, L’Arte Moderna (Rome: 1968), 634 in Dore Ashton, “À rebours: The Informal Rebellion,” À rebours: La rebellion informalista/The Informal Rebellion [1939-1968] (Las Palmas: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 1999), 17−45, 23.

mediation captured many of his contemporaries’ appreciations with regard to the futility of both rationality and logic. It also reflected the emergence of a postwar preoccupation with

Existentialism that, in the arts, manifested itself as a scatological trend baptized as informel and un art autre, by the French critics Jean Paulhan (1884−1968) and Michel Tapié

(1909−87) respectively.8 In its simplest of terms, art informel’s construct, (non)formalism, referred to the absence of form or what, in 1929, Bataille defined as the “unformed”

(informé). It was, in fact, a concept meant to undo the Aristotelian distinction of a logic between form and matter.9 Irrespective of etymology, the trend captured a generalized sentiment of despair that spread throughout Europe (particularly after 1945) as the full extent of the atrocities and devastation brought about by the war began to surface.10

8 Often interchanged, these terms did not gain much clarity until 1962 when Paulhan published his book L’art informel and that convention became more popular. In adopting the terminology, Paulham may have very well been abreast of a 1951 exhibition at the Parisian Galerie Paul Facchetti, Signifiants de l’informel, which featured work by Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Georges Mathieu, Jean- Paul Riopelle, and Jaroslav Serpan. See: Michel Tapié, Un art autre (Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et fils, 1952); and Jean Paulhan, L’art informel: éloge (Paris: Gallimard impr., 1962).

9 Despite of the importance of this fundamental concept to twentieth-century art, Bataille only devoted a modest entry to the term informé in his critical dictionary published in the Parisian Surrealist journal Documents. On the unformed, he wrote: “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.” Georges Bataille, “Critical Dictionary: Informe,” Documents (Paris) 7 (December 1929): 382. In Georges Bataille. Vision of Excess. Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Vol. 14 of Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.

10 To recap: 1945 was the year that the Russian Red Army liberated the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps (January), Hitler committed suicide (April), Berlin fell and the Allies declared Victory in Europe (May) bore the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan (August 6 and 9, respectively) killing more than 250,000 people.

At this critical moment, a generation of artists such as Jean Dubuffet (1901−85),

Jean Fautrier (1898−1964) or Wols (born Wolfgang Schulze, 1913−51), turned to an art of moral consequence capable of reaffirming mankind’s humanity. Juan Calzadilla wrote in

the catalogue for a group show in Cumaná, Venezuela (Salón de Lectura, opened on

October 23, 1960), that the most important aspect of Informalism was that “man free

himself from the profound emotional toll that his relationship with the world has taken.”11

Similarly, for the Spanish critic Simón Marchán Fiz, Informalism reflected the “passionate defense of the I in confrontation with its society.”12 Indeed, in keeping with

contemporaneous existentialist concerns, a key dimension of Informalism was the harkening back to a visceral, counter-intellectual, state of consciousness. This concern was

often expressed through the primacy of matter and its spontaneous application. Fautrier’s

Otages [Hostages] series (1943−45) (fig. 2.2), for instance, tapped into his auditory memories while hiding from the Gestapo in a psychiatric asylum outside Paris. Similarly,

Sierra Maestra (1959) (fig. 2.3) by Manuel Viola (1916−87) evoked the explosive moment when all of the pieces of the Cuban revolutionary process fell into place and Fidel Castro’s guerrillas descended victoriously from their mountainous stronghold on the eastern tip of the island. Implicit to the consolidation of Informalism was a fervent interest in suppressing traditional techniques in favor of current processes and actual materials leading

11 Calzadilla et al., [“Por un arte del mañana…”], [Por un arte del mañana] (Cumaná: Salón de Lectura, 1960), n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 77, box 19).

12 “Desde una perspectiva semiótica, el informalismo reflejaba de un modo indeterminado la relación del hombre con su naturaleza biológica y social. En sus consecuencias connotativas e ideológicas le apartaba del mundo de sus intereses concretos…defensa apasionada,…, de un yo enfrentado a su sociedad, contestatario en una especie de vitalismo romántico.” Emphasis mine. Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte de concepto, 19.

up to finished works that, as these two works show, could oscillate between the poles of abstraction and figuration. For many artists of the period, what was at stake was, in fact, an erratic new language of subjectivities and improvisation that centered on the belief that an archaizing position was often the only viable option.

Although the postwar moment was altogether different in Venezuela, by the late

fifties and early sixties its own complicated socioeconomic conditions had driven artists to

arrive at similar ontological pronouncements. More so than European strains of

Informalism, however, in Venezuela its adherents consistently sought to enter into critical relationships with their historical situation.13 That is to say, there as in other parts of Latin

America the trend had a very marked political dimension; something unheard of in Europe with the exception, perhaps, of the disguised “political” discourses of Spain’s short-lived multidisciplinary Grupo El Paso (1957−60) of which Viola was an important member.

As in Argentina, where it was brought to light by the group Otra (or Nueva)

Figuración [New Figuration] (1961−65), Informalism erupted on the Venezuelan art scene in February 1960 with the opening of the group exhibition Espacios vivientes at

13 In the sixties, a time of growing repressive regimes and escalating tensions on the political front, adscription to international trends often required Latin American artists to take firmer political stances than their European or North American counterparts. Ultimately, heightened pressure from an expanding local market and global art circuit had well-documented adverse effects on “national” representations to the extent that many were undermined as marginal propositions (as with El Techo). Ultimately, by the latter part of the decade, most artists and critics had either more firmly ratified their transformative social role or, as a result of the neutralized state of affairs of Latin American politics, abandoned it altogether. See, for example, Frederico de Morais, “A crise da vanguardia no Brasil,” for an acute analysis of the implications of censure and self-censure as alibis for creative silencing in Brazil, or Nelly Richard’s adoption of a cryptic language as a mechanism against intellectual oppression in Chile. Frederico de Morais, “II. A crise da vanguardia no Brasil,” Artes plasticas: a crise da hora atual (Rio de Janeiro: Editorial Paz e Terra, 1975), 101, 114; Nelly Richard, “Culturas latinoamericanas: ¿culturas de la repetición o culturas de la diferencia?,” [August 1983], in 5th Biennale of Sydney, org. Leon Paroissien (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1985). Damián Bayón sums up the moment well when he states that Latin American art at midcentury permanently operated within what he describes as “[el] límite de la tensión.” Damián Bayón, Aventura Plástica de Hispanoamérica. Pintura, cinetismo, artes de la acción [1940-1972] (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974), 332.

Maracaibo’s Palacio Municipal.14 The show brought together a cadre of young artists

including Pedro Briceño, Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Daniel González,

Fernando Irazábal, José María Cruxent, Ángel Luque, and Gabriel Morera (the last three

of Spanish backgrounds) who, for the preceding half decade, had worked independently

and were often oblivious to one another in what Contramaestre described as avant-garde

“islands.” These marginal, yet productive spaces, located in peripheral outposts such as

Maracaibo or the Andean city of Valera, preceded Caracas in opening up to international

renovatory tendencies in the arts and literature.15 As Calzadilla wrote in the catalogue for

Espacios vivientes (fig. 2.4), irrespective of the specific characteristics of their output, these

artists shared a generational concern for creative freedom. They were also, to varying

degrees, committed to exploring such pursuits as the estrangement from formal categorical

content, the physical destruction of the artwork, the disintegration of form and composition,

as well as an overt degradation of traditional media and techniques.16 What unified their

proposals, nevertheless, was a common concern for focusing on local and regional

situations.17 This position subsequently led them to attempt to generate, through original

14 Venezuelan scholar Roldán Esteva Grillet mentions that Maracaibo, and not Caracas, was chosen as the launching pad for the movement in order to piggyback on the organizational infrastructure of the literary group 40 Grados a la Sombra, which promoted the artistic avant-garde from its namesake gallery at the Plaza Urdaneta. Author’s email communication with Esteva Grillet, July 2, 2014.

15 Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 137−39.

16 Calzadilla, “Presentación: ESPACIOS VIVIENTES,” n/p. Espacios vivientes was organized by Calzadilla with assistance from Daniel González, Manuel Quintana, Perán Erminy, and Fernando Irazábal in Caracas and Josefina and Alberto Urdaneta from Maracaibo. Caracas’ Universidad Central and the Universidad del Zulio provided financial support. See also: Erminy, “El arte nuevo,” 572.

17 In Argentina, the artists of Nueva Figuración—Luis Felipe Noé, Ernesto Deira (1928−86), Jorge de la Vega (1930−71), and Rómulo Macció (b. 1931)—adopted similar socially committed stances. In 1966, Noé stated of their beginnings as a group: “Hace cuatro años [1962] regresamos de Europa a Buenos Aires y planteamos la necesidad de un arte sin prejuicios provincianos, con una libertad desafiante.…creíamos en un

materials and procedures, a “new [natural and uncontrollable] vision of the cosmos.”18 At

stake was a new articulation of a disorderly social reality that came to terms with the

prospect of a formless universe, a notion that Bataille had anticipated in the twenties.19

The work of the Venezuelan Informalists ranged from non-representational variants

of abstraction where forms were in various stages of disintegration—such as Ángel

Luque’s Untitled of 1962 (fig. 2.5) or Gabriel Morera’s Untitled (1961) from the Cabezas

[Heads] series (fig. 2.6)—to either of the anarchic or the political, as in Crónica de Caracas

con cráneos de la Digepol [Caracas Chronicles with Secret Police Skulls] of 1965 by

Calzadilla (fig. 2.7). Although, generally speaking, these artists took advantage of the

syntax of European Informalism, their proposals satisfied vastly different contextual

necessities. The blood-infused sand that Morera applied in his untitled [Cabeza], for

example, conjured the possibility of a new beginning from cataclysmic rubble in a manner

reminiscent of Dubuffet’s earlier experiential works with “monochromatic mud” such as

La Volonté de Puissance [The Will to Power] of 1946 (fig. 2.8). There is little question

that both works share similar interests in supra-aesthetic elements such as matter, waste,

earth, and, in the case of Morera, also bodily fluids. Yet, unlike Dubuffet whose work was

a visceral response to the isolation of mankind following continental destruction, Morera

humanismo violentamente explosivo, porque teníamos conciencia de que, por el momento, la única realidad nuestra era el hombre aislado, pero con su voluntad de movilización plena y a punto de explotar.” See: Noé, “La responsabilidad del artista que se va de América Latina y la del que se queda,” Mirador (New York) I, no. 7 (1966): 2−4. ICAA Digital Archive no. 740678.

18 “En la experiencia de las técnicas, el Informalismo plantea la necesidad de una libertad total de acción a fin de incorporar a la pintura materias y procedimientos originales que sirvan para elaborar una visión nueva del cosmos.” Calzadilla, “Presentación: ESPACIOS VIVIENTES,” n/p.

19 See note 9 in this chapter.

and his contemporaries in Venezuela spoke of man’s inconsequence vis-à-vis what seemed

to be an unstoppable (and malfunctioning) capitalist machine. This Venezuelan context

was behind similar concerns at the core of Calzadilla’s Crónica de Caracas (fig. 2.7). The

work on paper was a scathing critique of the “peace” that several Acción Democrática

administrations, from Rómulo Betancourt to Raúl Leoni (1905−72, in office 1964−69),

safeguarded through an extremely repressive apparatus headed the Dirección General de

Policía (DIGEPOL). Here Calzadilla stacked the severed skulls in a mass grave as black

stains make reference to the inescapability of the firing squad, while reminding us of the

assassinations and violence that escalated during this period.20

In the early years of the movement, the Venezuelan informalistas disdained dogmas

and schools and sought, instead, to distance themselves from legitimate art practices by

positioning themselves at the edge of chance, the experiential, and the procedural. For

these artists, experimentation required a disambiguation of the notions of individual/artist

and creation/work. The organizing committee for their second group show, the Salón

Experimental—which opened at Caracas’ Sala Mendoza in the fall of 1960 (September

18−October 2) (fig. 2.9) following the success of Espacios vivientes—defined the

relationship as follows:

20 For more on Venezuela’s violent process during the mandate of Betancourt and his reliance on repression, see: Araujo, Venezuela violenta, 50. He writes: “Digamos, por ahora, que sobre este telón de fondo se desarrolla la dinámica de una violencia engendrada por el fracaso de la democracia representativa para encarar las reformas fundamentales: así que la estabilidad y equilibrio que no se ha logrado mediante el reformismo, se pretende lograr mediante la policía y acudiendo al Ejército, cuando ya la policía resulta insuficiente para acallar las explosiones sociales del malestar.”

To think of an experimental art implies, foremost, an attitude that is not often seen among our milieu: we have become accustomed to seeing the artist as an individual whose personality reigns over his [or her] work. Their modest [work], in turn, pales in comparison to [the artist’s] personality. [The work] can only exist through the association with his [or her] reputation. We do not believe that painting is an act with lifelong implications for its creator. Rather, we believe that painting is a result against which the artist can once again feel free. We see painters as anonymous creators and this allows us to only gauge the work. Once realized, artistic creation is independent from the style from which it stemmed from; [and] it would be naïve to pretend that the work continues to exist as an appendix of its creator.21

Their proposed alienation of an artist’s persona and his production called attention to the uncertainty—just as in its fledgling democracy—that so plagued all levels of the national art circuit: established museums and galleries, the incipient art market and its nouveau riche consumers, art criticism and, of course, Venezuela’s far from experimental conservative public. Their premise thus propsed to erode institutional power from within this official circuit.

To that effect, the intent of the informalistas’ heterogeneous project was not to define the terms of a new homogeneous aesthetic but, rather, to challenge the creative uniformity of the geometric movement and the objectionable institutional baggage that had

21 “Pensar en un arte experimental supone desde luego una actitud que no es la habitual en nuestro medio: Se nos tiene acostumbrado a ver en el artista a un personaje que domina con su personalidad por encima de su obra; ésta es siempre modesta en comparación con el individuo y sólo puede existir si se la asocia al nombre de su autor. Nosotros, por el contrario, creemos en la pintura como en un resultado, ante el cual el artista se siente nuevamente libre, y no como en un acto que compromete a quien lo realiza para toda la vida. Vemos en el pintor un personaje anónimo. Esto nos permitirá juzgar solamente por la obra. La creación artística, una vez realizada, se independiza del estilo de donde ha surgido; sería ingenuo pretender que ella seguirá siendo un apéndice del autor.” Comité Organizador, [“Este salón reafirma…”], Salón Experimental (Caracas: Sala de Exposiciones Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, September 18−October 2, 1960), n/p. Coll. Archivos Documentales, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas. Also in MoMA, Coll. ETdlB/Oberto (object 75, box 19).

been attached to it.22 Contramaestre, who played a pivotal role in the establishment of El

Techo in the spring of 1961, recognized Informalism as an unconstrained, open, art movement that galvanized opposition to the orthodoxies of constructivism:

We considered that the sort of Neo-plasticism practiced by the geometrics had become an academy; that their searches were not conducive to anything beyond their absorption by capitalist [systems] and their consequential conversion into merchandise. In contrast, we proposed a destructive art.23

The adherents of Informalism, many of whom would later join Contramaestre in El Techo, called into question an officially sanctioned notion of “progress” and its problematic

22 Juan Calzadilla, [“En la última década la pintura…”], V pintores venezolanos en la VI Bienal de São Paulo ([Caracas]: unknown publisher, 1961), n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 5, box 19).

23 “Nosotros encontrábamos que esa suerte de neoplasticismo que hacían los geométricos se había transformado en academia, que sus búsquedas no conducían a nada, excepto a su absorción por el capitalismo y su posterior conversión en mercancía. Contra esto, propusimos un arte destructivo.” Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 139, 142. The Venezuelan Informalists’ aesthetics of violence mirrored similar propositions issued from the United States by the Brooklyn-born artist of Puerto Rican descent Raphael “Ralph” Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) and by Kenneth Kemble (1923−98) and the Arte Destructivo group from Argentina. In the late fifties, Montañez Ortiz had begun to create his first “destructivist” or “deconstructed” cinema by reworking found footage related to Hollywood stereotypes, North American social inequity, and the threat of technological warfare. These distance between the artist and his materials, he argued in the 1962 Destructivism manifesto, should be “close and direct”: “the artist must utilize processes which are inherent in the deep unconscious life, process which will necessarily produce a regression into chaos and destruction.” See: Rafael Montañez Ortiz, “Destructivism: a manifesto,” Years of the Warrior 1960, Years of the Psyche 1988 (1962; reprint, New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1988), 52. ICAA Digital Archive no. 796655. In 1961, Kemble and the Arte Destructivo group [Enrique Barilari (1931−2002), Jorge López Anaya (1936−2010), Jorge Roiger (b. 1934), Antonio Seguí (b. 1934), Silvia Torrás (b. 1936), and Luis Wells (b. 1939)] organized a paradigmatic group show at Buenos Aires’ Lirolay Gallery as the culmination of a project that had begun in 1958—the same year of Montañez Ortiz’s famed Newsreel—with Kemble’s Paisajes suburbanos collage series. His idea was to use found materials from the slums of Córdoba to create a new expressive art form and to “show on [Buenos Aires’ posh] Florida street an Argentine reality that should concern us all.” Certainly as Andrea Giunta notes in light of Kemble and Arte Destructivo: “The unifying concept of the group resided, precisely, in exploring the results of a violent action directed toward objects…an idea…being explored in various enclaves of the international avant- garde…in which both elements—waste and destruction—were present….” See Andrea Giunta, Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine art in the Sixties (2001; translation, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 88, 138−39. For Kemble’s text for the catalogue of the Arte Destructivo exhibition at Lirolay, see: “Arte destructivo,” in Arte destructivo: Barilari, Kemble, López Anaya, Roiger, Seguí, Torrás, Wells (Buenos Aires: Galería Lirolay, 1961), n/p. ICAA Digital Archive no. 741463.

outward projection/progression as well as the consequential institutional weight that, by the middle part of the decade, had been assigned to geometric abstraction in Venezuela.

And, these artists distrusted a tendency that had already been absorbed as merchandise by an economic system that had not known how to properly channel its energetic surplus.

Fernando Irazábal questioned, in the context of Espacios vivientes, how many

Venezuelans still considered geometric and constructive abstraction as embodiments of the avant-garde when, in his view, these formal tendencies were “stuck in the same problems that artists from the early [twentieth] century had dealt with” years before. “Venezuelan painting,” the artist continued, “is characterized by its complacency, its lack of originality and its enormous lag. It is a kind of painting that we could call secondhand and very over- handled…”24 Likewise, his colleague Alberto Brandt urged artists to embrace risk and mental adventure so as to widen the reach of Venezuela’s contemporary art: “art cannot remain [stagnant] repeating wasted formulas and commonplace notions” he said.25

Paradoxically, this aperture hinged upon the continuum of many of the same strategies that were useful for the promotion of Venezuelan constructivism and geometric abstraction at that very moment. These included the endless transformation of Caracas into a global art

24 “En Venezuela aún se consideran como expresiones artísticas de avanzada a las tendencias formalistas del abstraccionismo geométrico y del abstraccionismo constructivo, que son cosas estancadas en los mismos problemas que se planteaban los artistas de principios de este siglo. … A fin de cuentas, la pintura venezolana se caracteriza por su conformismo, su falta de originalidad y su enorme atraso. Es una pintura que podríamos llamar de segunda mano, y muy manoseada, por cierto.” Irazábal in Erminy, “El arte nuevo,” 573.

25 “Estoy convencido de que el arte no puede quedarse en repeticiones de fórmulas agotadas y en lugares comunes, como el abstraccionismo geométrico y el constructivismo actual. La creación auténtica tiene que producirse desde un plano de riesgo y de aventura mental.” Ibid.

hub (begun under the mandate of Marcos Pérez Jiménez), the international sanctioning of a “brand-new” Venezuelan art that gained critical mass following his 1958 ousting, and the positioning of local Informalists within what Calzadilla described as a worldwide phenomenon of transformation.26 What they sought then was to insert their country within an alternate circuit taking shape by the early sixties for which Informalism, and not geometric-abstraction, was emerging as the language of choice.

Interlude: El Paso’s Spanish Contrarianism

The Madrid-based Grupo El Paso presents a compelling counterpoint to the project that El Techo de la Ballena put in motion in Venezuela in the spring of 1961, less than a year after the Spanish collective disbanded. Pedro Briceño, Carlos Contramaestre, and the

Spanish-born Ángel Luque had spent their formative years in Spain and had direct links to

El Paso.27 Frequent showings of contemporary Spanish art in Caracas,28 moreover, also

26 Calzadilla, “Presentación, [Salón Experimental],” n/p.

27 Contramaestre spent the years from 1956 to 1961 completing medical studies at the Universidad de Salamanca, where he was joined by Caupolicán Ovalles, and gravitated to the Madrid-based collective during those years. A scholarship from the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica had allowed Briceño to settle in Madrid by the mid-fifties where he too fell under El Paso’s sphere of influence. He was friendly with Jorge Oteiza and Pablo Serrano, both of whom had spent considerable time in Latin America: Oteiza lived in South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina and Chile) between 1934 and 1948 and Serrano immigrated to Argentina in 1929 and spent over 25 years between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. It was Pablo Serrano, moreover, who pushed Briceño to exhibit his wood and cork pieces at Madrid’s Librería-Galería Clan. Luque, who had been born in Córdoba, was active in the Madrid artistic scene between 1948 and 1955 prior to his emigration to Venezuela, where he remained for much of the 1955 to 1967 period. He joined the Madrid-based Artistas de Hoy group, which met and exhibited their nonfigurative work at the Librería- Galería Fernando Fe at the Puerta del Sol. The group included, among others, the famed sculptor of Basque extraction Eduardo Chillida (1924−2002), as well as Oteiza, Feito, and Canogar who would later go on to participate in El Paso.

28 In El Techo’s active years, for example, Caracas’ Galería Mendoza alone mounted several exhibitions such as Pintura española en las colecciones privadas de Caracas (January 19−February 2, 1960), Pintura Española contemporánea (July 10−24, 1960)—with works by, among others, Canogar, Millares, and

allowed the several other Spanish-born—notably Gabriel Morera and José María

Cruxent—and local balleneros to keep abreast of Informalist developments in Spain.29 It

could certainly be argued that contact with Spanish Informalism, Grupo El Paso in

particular, may have initially skewed El Techo’s germinal nucleus towards their continued

espousal of that style in their individual production. In more specific terms, it may have

even led them to adapt some of the Spaniards’ methods in their own renovatory project.

Yet, adopting such a hegemonic and commonplace position negates the fact that

Venezuelan Informalism could trace its roots to the years prior to the consolidation of El

Paso in 1957 or that, indeed, many of its most notable practitioners were well established

internationally even before Espacios vivientes and Salón Experimental galvanized the

caraqueño movement in 1960. Therefore, my intent here is, to position the development

of El Paso and El Techo on equal footing (although as parallel divergent trajectories)

stemming from a common ground and, one could argue, under similar sociopolitical

contexts. Establishing the parameters and points of reference for this contrasting group

allows us to more fully grasp the uniqueness of El Techo’s project in Caracas.

Antonio Saura—, and Diez pintores españoles (July 1−15, 1961)—Juana Francés was among the artists featured—that, in theory, could have strengthened Gabriel Morera and José María Cruxent’s connections to their home country. See Sala Mendoza 1956−2001. 45 años de historia del arte contemporáneo en Venezuela, ed. Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Aixa Sánchez (Caracas: Sala Mendoza, 2002), 92−105.

29 Morera studied drawing and painting at the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid from 1951 to 1954, spent a year in Venezuela between 1955 and 1956, returned to Spain briefly, and definitively relocated to Caracas in 1957. Cruxent was perhaps more distanced from the fifties renaissance taking shape in Madrid and Barcelona since he had left Spain in the late thirties with the fall of the Republic (settling in Caracas by 1939) but could have, ostensibly, also have had contact with Spanish colleagues over the years.

Spain had remained neutral during WWII as it struggled to recover from its

tumultuous Civil War (1936−39).30 Isolated during the war due to Hitler’s extensive

support to Franco’s uprising, Spanish modern art had effectively not undergone the same

sort of linear evolution as in the rest of Europe. Many intellectuals had died in the Iberian

conflict, others (such as Luque, Morera, and Cruxent) had been expatriated, and, of the

remaining, many worked quietly in a state of innermost, interior exile. Unlike concerted

efforts in Venezuela to promote geometric-abstraction, the dictatorial regime of Francisco

Franco (1892−1975, in power 1939−75) had not sought to define a true Fascist art or even

to attack, as the Nazis did in Germany, the avant-garde as Entartete Kunst [degenerate art].

Under those circumstances, artistic academism ended up assuming the role of official art in Spain. During the first decade of franquismo, any opposition to artistic academism was seen as an invitation to insubordination, not only artistic, but sociopolitical as well and was thus thwarted.31 But by the fifties, the conditions were ripe for significant changes within

the system. Politically, Franco’s government loosened the tight grip through which it had

exerted outright control, invested heavily in infrastructure and developmental programs,

and urgently sought international aperture and allegiances.32 Likewise in the cultural

30 Although officially neutral, Franco supported Hitler during WWII, specifically through the Blue Division: Spanish volunteers who fought on the Eastern front against Russia.

31 María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, “The Significance of Spanish Informalism,” in Ashton, À rebours, 69−79, 76−77.

32 These changes were ongoing for the next twenty years and climaxed with Spain’s transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975. See Eugenio Carmona, “Identidad como Modernidad. Nuevo encuentro con el grupo El Paso,” in El Paso. Arte y compromsio, org. Centro Cultural Puerta Real Caja Granada (Granada: CajaGRANADA Obra social, catálogo no. 230, 2007), 22−37, 23.

sphere, the opening of a bevy of institutions—including the Bienal Hispanoamericana de

Arte of 1951−52 (Madrid) and 1955−56 (Barcelona), as well as Madrid’s Museo de Arte

Contemporáneo (est. 1951)—promoted a mirage of normality and put an end to fifteen years of isolationism in Spain.33

The world seemed to open up to Spanish artists when, in the latter part of the fifties,

a generation that included Antonio Saura (1930−98), Antoni Tàpies (1923−2012) and

Manolo Millares (1925−72), gained national recognition with work that, at the surface, embraced the language of Informalism. In Madrid, Saura and Millares were founding members of El Paso (fig. 2.10), which actively participated in the structural changes that were being generated in the country.34 The group brought together artists, writers, filmmakers, and other intellectuals to “…invigorate contemporary Spanish art,” at a pivotal moment when despite its “brilliant antecedents” Spain’s cultural milieu lacked necessary infrastructure, or what the group defined as “constructive criticism, art dealers, [or] exhibition venues capable of orienting the [uninformed] public.”35 Moreover, with

33 With an interlude in Havana during its second edition (1954), the Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte was arguably the single most important cultural event of the dictatorship. Not only did it signal the end of academicism, which Franco had privileged since 1939, but it also exposed Spain’s conservative public to the most up-to-date tendencies in contemporary art. The I Bienal, in particular, triggered a rapid actualization of the national visual arts field and helped Spanish artists to penetrate the international avant-garde. For more on this watershed moment and the slew of “Contrabienales” and boycotts that were mounted in opposition to Franco’s efforts, see Miguel Cabañas Bravo, “La Primera Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte: Arte, política y polémica en un certamen internacional de los años cincuenta” (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1991).

34 Established on February 20, 1957, El Paso’s first exhibition held at Madrid’s Buchholz Gallery in April of that year. In May, the group showed their work in Oviedo and Gijón. Other founding members included Rafael Canogar (b. Rafael García Gómez, 1935) and Luis Feito (b. 1929). They were soon joined by Martín Chirino (b. 1925), Juana Francés (1924−90)—who married Pablo Serrano in 1956—, Serrano (1908−85), Antonio Suárez (b. 1923), Manuel Rivera (1928−95), and Manuel Viola (1916−87). See: Grupo El Paso, “Noticias de El Paso,” El Paso 7 (Winter 1958), transcribed in Centro Cultural Puerta Real Caja Granada, El Paso, 123.

increased international exposure, it was thought, Spanish society was at risk of falling prey to institutional interests that espoused “repugnant materialism [and] Machiavellian economic and spiritual [strategies]” as the only viable escape route from an otherwise

“desperate situation.”36 To realize their objectives, El Paso proposed group and individual exhibitions, a yearly salon with Spanish and international artists, as well as the publication of an official newsletter though which to disseminate the most current ideas in contemporary art.37 Although this ambitious program was never fully realized, in the span of a few years El Paso became an eponym for a quite different, innovative Spain: a nation au courant with the global artistic scene.38 Certainly, the collective was deeply imbricated

35 “[El Paso] es una agrupación de artistas plásticos que se han reunido para vigorizar al arte contemporáneo español, que cuenta con tan brillantes antecedentes, pero que en el momento actual, falto de una crítica constructiva, de ‘marchands’, de salas de exposiciones que orienten al público, y de unos aficionados que apoyan toda actividad renovadora, atraviesa una aguda crisis.” Grupo El Paso, “El Paso” [first manifesto], February 1957, original at the Centro de Documentacion del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Reproduced and transcribed in Centro Cultural Puerta Real Caja Granada, El Paso, 106−07. It is likely that the manifesto was written by José Ayllón but it was also signed by Rafael Canogar, Luis Feito, Juana Francés, Millares, Saura, Manuel Rivera, Pablo Serrano, Suárez, and Conde. See: Carmona, “Indentidad como Modernidad,” 36 (note 6).

36 “A las ideas nuevas les oponen los conceptos viejos, pretendiendo desacreditar aquellas y aumentar la confusión, aun a costa de prolongar una situación desesperada no les importa reducir la única salida del hombre a un materialismo repugnante, creyendo que de esta manera serán más fácil presa de sus maquiavelismos económicos y espirituales. Hay que ofrecer al hombre de hoy una nueva unidad del mundo creando otra moral que pueda contenerlo por entero, para ello es imprescindible antes de nada, que satisfaga las nuevas necesidades que han surgido en esta época, con el fin de que pueda desarrollar y comprender las nuevas formas de sentimiento que tienen que determinar al hombre de nuestro tiempo, tampoco queremos una civilización mecanicista que domine al hombre y le convierta en un robot. Debemos salvar la individualidad del ser humano, es una responsabilidad de la que son conscientes muchos hombres en los que ha ido creciendo el sentimiento de esa liberación individual.” José Ayllón Statement, transcribed in Centro Cultural Puerta Real Caja Granada, El Paso, 109−10.

37 Grupo El Paso, “El Paso” [first manifesto].

38 El Paso brought to fruition just a few isolated events and published only three issues of their namesake newsletter. See: Fernando Castro Flórez, “Notas a El Paso,” in Centro Cultural Puerta Real Caja Granada, El Paso, 14−21, 16.

with the Spanish sociopolitical climate of its time. Outwardly, however, its informal aesthetics were publicly viewed as interior commentaries. Examples ranged widely from the monochromatic gestural works of Rafael Canogar (b. 1935) (fig. 2.11) and Saura, which recall similar work done by Luque in Venezuela (fig. 2.5), to the thick impastoed and matter-laden canvases of Viola (fig. 2.3) and Luis Feito (b. 1929), to Manuel Rivera’s

(1927−95) wire mesh constructions (fig. 2.12) reminiscent of the Dibujos sin papel

[Drawings without Paper] wire assemblages that the Caracas-based Gego (born Gertrude

Goldschmidt, 1912−94) began in 1976−77.39 Consequently, these works’ inexplicit language was deemed inoffensive to Franco’s policies and it was not long until the regime

promoted El Paso and its members from within.40

39 Gego had actually begun weaving wire, steel, lead, nylon, and found material as early as 1964 but her experimentation reached unprecedented heights in 1969 with the installation of her first Reticulárea at Caracas’ Museo de Bellas Artes. With the Dibujos sin papel series, however, the artist transfers similar concerns with illusionary depth and transparent volume unto a slightly more restrained format that blurs the lines between traditional support and three dimensional space. For more on Gego, see: María Elena Huizi, Ester Crespin, Mari Carmen Ramirez and Melina Kervandjian, Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea: An Anthology of Critical Response (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2013); Mari Carmen Ramírez, Josefina Manrique, and Catherine de Zegher, Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible (Houston and Buenos Aires: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and MALBA-Colección Costantini, 2006); Mari Carmen Ramírez, María Elena Huizi and Josefina Manrique, Sabiduras y otros textos de Gego/Sabiduras and Other Texts by Gego (Houston and Caracas: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Fundación Gego, 2005); or Mari Carmen Ramírez and Theresa Papanikolas, Questioning the Line: Gego in Context, Vol. II of ICAA Series (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003).

40 Millares, Feito, and Rivera, for example, were among the Spanish delegation to the IV Bienal de São Paulo in 1957; a key opportunity for international recognition that led to the acquisition of works by Rivera and Millares by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. for the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. The group also participated in the Spanish Pavilion for the XXIX Venice Biennale of 1958—organized, like the Spanish exhibition for the 1957 Bienal de São Paulo, by critic Luis González Robles. Additional international incursions included: “Espacio y color en la pintura española de hoy,” Spanish delegation for the V Bienal de São Paulo (1959), which travelled to Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Viña del Mar, Santiago, Lima, Bogotá, Medellín and Cali; Four Spanish Artists, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (March 15−April 9, 1960); the group [specifically Canogar, Feito, Francés, Millares, Rivera, Saura, Suárez and Viola] was also prominently included in the exhibitions Before Picasso, After Miró (Guggenheim, NYC, June−July, 1960); Ocho pintores de España (Galería Mendoza, Caracas, July 1960) [Millares, Canogar and Saura among them]; and New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York (July−September, 1960) [which included all of the El Paso artists except Juana Francés]. For more on the international dimension of Grupo El Paso, see: Genoveva Tusell García, “La proyección internacional de los artistas de ‘El Paso’

Mistaken for complacency, El Paso’s seemingly personal canvases obscured a more

complex collective political position that was, ironically, in stark opposition to Franco’s regime. Indeed, as the ballenero Contramaestre recognized, the Spanish group “confronted denouncement, political intolerance and the social repression of Franco’s Fascist dictatorship.”41 The connection between the group’s abstract aesthetics and political

commitment, however implicit, was an act of will and a matter of attitude for its members.42

This inherently anti-establishment objective did not reflect a blind yearning for the future but, rather, a return to the democratic order that had been interrupted by the Spanish Civil

War. Eugenio Carmona writes that the group appealed to the notion of a Spanish vernacular and to a certain difference vis-à-vis Europe resulting from the alienation to which the country had been subjected as a consequence of the Spanish conflict and the resulting displacement of millions of its citizens (many of whom were exiled throughout

Latin America, Mexico in particular). To avoid the potential pitfall of appearing retardé, the group willfully self-fashioned itself as the continuators of a lineage of European aesthetic innovations that had been interrupted, if briefly, by Spain’s internal politics

(1955−1964),” in El Paso: Zaragoza, Centro de Exposiciones y Congresos, del 29 de abril al 29 de junio de 2003, org. Javier Tusell (Zaragoza, Spain: IberCaja, Obra Social y Cultural, [2003]), 41−48; and Anna María Guasch, “La dinámica internacional del grupo El Paso: entre París y Nueva York,” in El Paso a la moderna intensidad, org. Chus Tudelilla ([Toledo], Spain: Fundación de Cultura y Deporte de Castilla-La Mancha, 2009), 80−93.

41 “El Paso, atraído por la pintura tenebrista…se erige como una vanguardia enfrentada a la denuncia, la intolerancia política y la represión social de la dictadura fascista de Franco.” Carlos Contramaestre, “La autopsia como experiencia límite en el informalismo venezolano o La poética del escalpelo sobre la materia efímera corrupta,” undated manuscript in the Sala Arcaya, Biblioteca Nacional, Caracas. Published in Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 264−71, 268.

42 The Spanish critic José María Moreno Galván clarified the problem of the difficult union between abstraction and political commitment in 1959, at the apogee of Spanish Informalism, when he stated that “reality is an issue irrelevant to representation. Representation is not, in itself, reality.” Quoted in Jiménez- Blanco, “Spanish Informalism,” 77.

during the early decades of the twentieth century. In positioning themselves as the heirs to

an expressionistic tradition that Francisco de Goya (1746−1828) initiated through his series of Black Paintings (1819−23, approximately) (fig. 2.13) and José Gutiérrez Solana

(1886−1945) (fig. 2.14) continued, the artists of El Paso adopted a view on modernity that had little to do with the technological Utopia that had been embraced in the rest of Europe and in the United States by midcentury. On the contrary, the group’s covert denunciations of inherently national conditions hinged upon a return to a previous strain of Spanish aesthetics steeped in the language of the dark side, the abject, and the anti-aesthetic.43

As we shall see, despite important affinities between both groups—interest in

interdisciplinarity and collectivism, disavowal of the linear progression of modern art and

of a technological modernity, a penchant for the macabre, and a deliberate anachronism—

El Paso’s muted political pronouncements paled in comparison to El Techo’s extreme

radicalism. Unlike the Spanish collective, for whom Informalism remained a satisfactory

tract for their desired aesthetic rejuvenation, El Techo’s preeminent ideological imperative

required the incorporation of methods and tactics that extended well beyond the realm of

culture and art. Indeed, as Ángel Rama recognized, the virulence with which the group

reacted to the country’s vertiginous yet incomplete passage from a traditional to an

43 In El Paso’s view, this fundamental difference stemmed from the alienation that they had been subjected to at the hands of Franco’s regime. Yet, paradoxically, the ground of their search for identity was aesthetic and not political; their antagonistic stance tacit and not explicit. Indeed, as Carmona notes, the strategy allowed El Paso to eschew the characterization of Spanish art as marginal in the global arena in favor of a narrative stressing how the group continued a tradition of unique aesthetic contributions that had momentarily lapsed at the national level. See: Carmona, “Indentidad como Modernidad,” 32.

industrialized society set it apart from other avant-gardes occurring elsewhere in the region as well as in Europe and the United States.44

Climax: Taking Up Arms in Venezuela

Exactly three days after the Partido Comunista de Venezuela committed itself to an armed insurrection against Betancourt’s government in March 1961, El Techo de la Ballena inaugurated its activities with the exhibition Para la restitución del magma.45 Active in the PCV since his youth, writer Salvador Garmendia found himself in the midst of the dissolution of the literary group Sardio, whose last actions were becoming increasingly more belligerent. By this time, Sardio’s most radical bloc—that also included Adriano

González León, Rodolfo Izaguirre, Edmundo Aray, and Francisco Pérez Perdomo—had grown convinced of the necessity of guerilla tactics, including on the cultural front.46 Their

44 Ángel Rama, “Prólogo,” 19.

45 The PCV, radicalized its stance during their III Congress held March 10−16, 1961 during which it decided to prepare for armed combat against the government. From that moment on, the PCV fortified what were then loose guerilla cells and armed the more ambitious rural and urban foci throughout the country. The combined efforts of these dissenting factions led to the 1962 formation of the militant FLN and its guerilla organization (FALN). For more on the radicalization of the Venezuelan extreme Left, see Chapter 1, “The Undoing of Order,” 62−68.

46 El Techo members were active in several organisms within Venezuela’s radical Left. In the late fifties, Salvador Garmendia had used his position of radio personality to keep listeners abreast of what was then an incipient guerilla movement in the countryside through his serial Marcela Campos, la guerrillera de los Llanos (1958). Caupolicán Ovalles joined the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) upon its founding on April 1960, and the publication of his incendiary anti-Betancourt poem ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? in 1962 led to his exile in Colombia. The militancy of Adriano González León—whose own involvement in the publication, including his prologue “Investigación de las basuras,” was the subject of intense scrutiny by the DIGEPOL—led to his imprisonment in 1964, the same year that Mary Ferrero (his wife) and Daniel González were detained. That same year Ángel Luque was imprisoned and deported to his native Spain for serving as an accomplice in the kidnapping of Lt. Col. Michael Smolen, deputy chief of the United States’ mission to the Venezuelan Air Force. Smolen had been taken hostage by the FALN and kept hidden in Luque’s studio while the group offered him as trade for the life of Nguyen Van Troi, a Viet Cong bomber under death sentence in South Viet Nam. This last incident received extensive press coverage in Venezuela and in the U.S., including: “Terrorists in Venezuela Kidnap U.S. Officer, Offer Life As Trade,”

extremist position provoked a schism between them and the more moderate intellectuals within Sardio (Guillermo Sucre, Rómulo Aranguíbel, Luis García Morales, Ramón

Palomares, among them) and ultimately became one of the hallmarks of El Techo along with a violent rejection of the local art community and a passion for experimentation.47 El

Techo’s attitude was already detectable in Sardio’s eighth and final number (May−June

1961). With Izaguirre, Garmendia, Castellanos, and Aray at the helm, Sardio reprinted the watershed Cuban manifesto “Hacia una cultura nacional que impulse la revolución” that originally appeared in Cuba on November 19, 1960 and had been signed by the leading intellectuals of the early post-revolutionary period in alignment with Fidel Castro.48 That number also included Gonzalo Castellanos’ unsigned “Testimonio sobre Cuba” which in the context of the Cuban Revolution troubled what, in his opinion, had been a unilaterally

St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, Florida) 81, no. 78 (October 10, 1964): 1−A. For more on Luque’s involvement in the Smolen Affair, see: Beatriz Sogbe, “¿Dónde está Ángel Luque?, in Ángel Luque. Imágenes primarias: 1957-1965, org. Colección Museo Arturo Michelena (Caracas: Colección Museo Arturo Michelena, 2001), 3. For a plea for Adriano González León freedom by a number of Venezuelan intellectuals, see “Quién Metió Preso Al Escritor Adriano González Se Llama Sub-Desarrollo. Escritores y artistas piden la libertad del joven intelectual,” El Clarín de los Viernes (Caracas) (January 1, 1964): 6. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 166, box 23).

47 Juan Calzadilla, “[En la última década la pintura…”], VI Bienal de São Paulo, n/p.

48 Edmundo Aray has stated that by that point many of Sardio’s members had either gone underground or left Venezuela in order to escape persecution. Guillermo Sucre, Adriano González León, and Rómulo Aranguibel were in Paris, Elisa Lerner in New York, and Gonzalo Castellanos was in Germany. Their prolonged absence from Venezuela opened the window to more radical discourses from the Sardio’s literary platform. Anita Tapias and Félix Suazo, “Edmundo Aray: de la vida y aventuras de El Techo de la Ballena [entrevista],” [Caracas, 1999], Agulha Revista de Cultura (Fortaleza/São Paulo) no. 60 (November- December 2007); recently reprinted in Nueva antología de El Techo de la Ballena, ed. Edmundo Aray (Mérida, [Venezuela]: FUNDECEM, 2014), 123−43, 124−25.

beneficial relationship for the United States (particularly with respect to Cuba and Puerto

Rico) and it also reproduced several of El Techo’s foundational documents.49

At face value, Para la restitución del magma appeared much like the dozen or so informalista exhibitions that Calzadilla and the other balleneros had already participated in by that point at a number of national and international venues.50 The twenty-three exhibited works by some of the names that had become mainstays of the informalist movement in Venezuela and who, through the participation in the exhibition, had pledged allegiance to El Techo (Briceño, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Cruxent, Daniel González,

Irazábal, Luque, Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo) all subscribed to an informalist

49 Notably, El Techo’s “Pre-Manifesto” and the introductions to their first two exhibitions: Para la restitución del magma (March 1961) and Homenaje a la cursilería (May 1961). See: Sardio. Revista de literatura (Caracas), year III, vol. VI, no. 8 (May-June 1961). Aray recalls that Castellanos was, ironically, one of the least politicized of the group but even so his piece inflamed many pro-establishment Venezuelan intellectuals as well as some of the more moderate Sardio members that were in exile. See: Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 125.

50 Espacios Vivientes was held at Maracaibo’s Palacio Municipal, the seat of municipal government. Juan Calzadilla and Daniel González then went on to present the work of Alberto Brandt, Teresa Casanova, Perán Erminy, González, Fernando Irazábal, Cruxent, Jaimes Sánchez, Mercedes Pardo, Manuel Quintana, Luisa Richter, Maruja Rolando, Jesús Soto and Renzo Vestrini in the group exhibition Venezuela Pintura Hoy at Havana’s Palacio de Bellas Artes (Dirección de Cultura, Ministerio de Educación, opened on July 22, 1960) and at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas (Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Cultura, opened on August 28, 1960). The venue for Salón Experimental, the Sala Mendoza (established in August 1956) was one of the earliest sites of private art patronage in Caracas. Following the success of these three shows, the informalistas took their show on the road, literally, bringing their work to provincial audiences in cities such as Trujillo (Ateneo de Trujillo, opened on October 9, 1960), Valera (Ateneo de Valera), Boconó (Ateneo de Boconó), Cumaná (Salón de Lectura, opened on October 23, 1960), Valencia (Ateneo de Valencia, opened on November 23, 1960) and Los Teques (Biblioteca Cecilio Acosta, opened on December 1, 1960). The following year Calzadilla selected Irazábal, Casanova, Cruxent, Rolando, and González to represent Venezuela at the VI Bienal de São Paulo (September-December 1961). See: Juan Calzadilla and Daniel González, Venezuela Pintura Hoy ([Caracas and Havana:] Casa de las Américas, 1960). Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 74, box 19); Calzadilla et al., [Exposición colectiva] (Trujillo: Ateneo de Trujillo, 1960), (object 76, box 19); Calzadilla et al., [Por un arte del mañana…] (Cumaná: Salón de Lectura, October 1960); Calzadilla et al., [Por un arte de hoy…] (Valencia: Ateneo de Valencia, November 1960), (object 78, box 19); Calzadilla et al., [Por un arte de hoy…] (Los Teques: Biblioteca Cecilio Acosta, December 1960), (object 79, box 19); and Calzadilla, V pintores venezolanos (São Paulo), 1961.

aesthetic (fig. 2.15). However, the desplegable—in fact, a manipulable foldout—that the

group printed and distributed during the opening left little doubt of an alternate radicalized

stance. It constituted the first number of rayado sobre el techo (figs. 2.16 a-b) and included

the text “para la restitución del magma,” which the collective issued as its first official

manifesto:

It is necessary to restore magma the boiling matter the lust of lava to place a piece of fabric at the foot of a volcano to restore the world the lust of lava to show that matter is more lucid than color in this way the amorphous cuts away at the superfluous that prevents reality from transcending it overcomes the immediacy of matter as a means of expression making [matter] not an instrument of implementation but an active medium that explodes impact matter transcends itself matter transcends itself textures tremble rhythms draw vertigo that which precedes over the act of creation which is violence-to leave evidence of one’s existence because magma must be restored in its decline…51

Recapturing the rhetoric of the foundational documents for Venezuelan Informalism, El

Techo’s manifesto ennobled magma as an expressive matter that could be at once slow and

violent, fluid and imposing, interacting and disengaging, retreating and advancing.52

51 Emphasis mine. “es necesario restituir el magma la material en ebullición la lujuria de la lava colocar una tela al pie de un volcán restituir el mundo la lujuria de la lava demostrar que la material es más lúcida que el color de esta manera lo amorfo cercenado de la realidad todo lo superfluo que le impide trascenderse supera la inmediatez de la material como medio de expression haciendola no instrument ejecutor pero sí medium actuante que se vuelve estallido impacto la material se trasciende la material se trasciende las texturas se estremecen los ritmos tienden al vértifo eso que preside al acto de crear ques violentarse-dejar constancia de que es porque hay que restituir el magma en su caída…” El Techo de la Ballena, “para la restitución del magma,” in rayado sobre el techo: letras, humor, pintura (Caracas) no. 1 (March 24 1961): recto. Translation by Laura Pérez in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 264−65 with my modifications.

52 Calzadilla made frequent allusions to the Bataillean notion of matter as an end in itself during the formational period of Venezuelan Informalism leading up to the establishment of El Techo in 1961. In Espacios vivientes, for instance, he had used such phrases as “continuous movement,” “vital impulses,” and “substantive quality of matter” to frame the movement. Calzadilla, “Espacios vivientes,” n/p.

Yet, at the same time, Para la restitución del magma established the chief condition of difference between El Techo’s practice and the aesthetic objectives of Venezuelan

Informalism. It identified violence as the locus for the balleneros’ creative enterprise.

Years later, Garmendia characterized their terrorist stance in the following manner:

We had to create a combative art, an art of aggression, of action against society; art whose concern would not be permanence, but [rather] to jab and retreat, to shock, shake, even if it later disappeared. …We were interested in how [our work] impacted society: it was aggressive, it rattled, like a spit in the face. That is why we worked with the most despicable and ungrateful of materials, animal viscera, bones, maggots from carcasses[—]because we thought that it was a way of assaulting and insulting.53

His antagonistic rhetoric dispelled any doubts over the group’s allegiance to a politicized

strain of Informalism, an approach that set El Techo apart from many other Venezuelan

and international artists.

Fernando Irazábal’s work from the El occiso [The Deceased] series, one of which was included in Para la restitución del magma, illustrates the tension between the group’s formal adherence to Informalism and its broader, more ambitious, political aims. Although the checklist does not indicate the exact measurements of any of the works on display, and therefore makes it quite difficult to identify definitively the specific version of El occiso that was shown, it must have been very similar to several other known works from the

53 “…nosotros, como artistas, veíamos la sociedad y la política siempre a través del arte…considerábamos que en aquel momento no valía la pena hacer un arte exquisito, un arte para minorías, un arte con proposiciones estéticas solamente, sino que había que hacer un arte de combate, un arte de agresión, de acción contra la sociedad; que el arte no se preocupara por permanecer, sino por golpear y desaparecer, escandalizar, sacudir, aunque después desapareciera... Nos interesaba el efecto que, de hecho, produjo en la sociedad: de agresión, de golpe, casi de escupitajo a la cara, por eso se trabajó con las materias más deleznables y más infelices, con vísceras de animales, con huesos, gusanos de animales muertos, porque pensábamos que era una manera de agredir y de insultar.” Garmendia in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 116.

series. These include: a round mixed media on wood c. 1960 (fig. 2.17), an oblong panel

captured by a photograph in the El Techo de la Ballena Collection at MoMA(fig. 2.18),

and a collage of at least three different Occisos illustrating the cover of the catalogue for

Irazábal’s exhibition Bestias, occisos, held at Caracas’ Sala Mendoza in 1962 (fig. 2.19).

Certainly, these works read as emblems of Informalism in their overall coarseness, thick

impasto, subdued palette, and built-up matter. Nevertheless, Irazábal’s unapologetic confrontation with death itself and the remains of life at the core of the series indicated the material degree to which his interests extended beyond the realm of the artistic. In some

of the pieces, he presented us with a confused mess of earthy matter from which extend

forms that recall human skeletal remains. In others, such as the example on the upper left

of the exhibition catalogue, the artist incorporated a clearly visible skull turned slightly

upwards as in a grimace—its jawbone protruding, its mouth gaped—attached to half a

ribcage; among the discernable bones, a collarbone and a humerus. These works were not

intended for quiet contemplation, but rather aimed to elicit a response from spectators in

order to extract some minimal clarity from the disarrayed fragments of life. In both the

tondo and the photographed panel, masses of paint, pigment, and found objects appeared

to bubble, peel, and curl away from the surface exposing layer upon layer of underlying

matter. If they seemed to become activated by a pseudo-archeological excavation, the

examples on the bottom and right-hand side of the leaflet suggest an opposing constrictive

process in the metal wire and cloth that engulfed and immobilized the figures. In any event,

all were immersed in the literal process of returning earth unto earth as far as reality

disintegrated into a viscous, dirty, corroded onslaught of pain and violence.

In the days following the March 24, 1961 opening of Para la resitución del magma,

Juan Calzadilla published “Cierta ballena,” a fake “review” of the exhibition in Jueves, the cultural supplement of El Nacional that ran on Thursdays. Writing under the penname of

Esteban Muro, the author sabotaged the traditional format of art criticism to make a mockery of reputable news outlets such as El Nacional through his coverage of the opening. Rather than passing judgment on the formal qualities of the works themselves,

Calzadilla/Muro opted to provide outlandish details on the evening privileging such irreverent testimonies as the initial hesitancy of the crowd waiting for the whale-gallery to open its “big mouth” and let them in; the celebratory cheers that ensued once a one-man- band arrived; or even the stench of materials such as whale lard, viscera, and bones that the artists had supposedly used in crafting their “erogenous and unisexual” pictures and sculptures.54

The critique, moreover, serves to record some of the performative aspects of opening night as well as of the exhibition itself. For example, “just as the public began to die from asphyxia,” Muro recounted, organizers flung copies of the foldout in a final

54 “en el interior, en lo que más que estomago era un esófago, salpicadas por el agua que dejaba escapar intermitentemente una llave que nunca pudo ser reparada, nadaban esculturas construidas con intestinos de carros. …En las paredes, guindados: redes de cazar galápagos, retículas, membranas, pituitarias y cuadros erógenos unisexuados para mover a reflexión a la ballena pintados con escamas de peces de agua dulce pintados por Gabriel Morera, Carlos Contramaestre, Irazábal y Moisés Ottop. Un cuadro de Ángel Luque hecho con Manteca-de-cachalote. Una hélice cervical de gran ballena dando vueltas todavía estremecida sobre un pedestal giratorio reluciente recordaba a Brancusi. Una brújula tridimensional de espantar animales de mar adentro pintada por Cruxent y pegada en la puerta-dentadura descubría los buenos y malos modales de los visitantes cayéndose a cada momento al suelo.” Esteban Muro [Juan Calzadilla], “Cierta ballena,” undated newspaper clipping (c. 1961) from Jueves/El Nacional, Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 133, box 23).

dramatic gesture that rendered the attendees speechless.55 The desplegable included an article, “Última hora,” announcing the false theft of some of the paintings from the gallery.

In a pseudo-journalistic tone that recalled the biting language Calzadilla/Muro used in the previously cited review, the group used its printed material to issue a similar bluff. This time the ruse involved the supposed theft of informalista canvases from their gallery:

LATEST NEWS: We have been forced to withdraw a graphic article about Max Ernst that was to appear in this page on order to report a daring theft that took place in our Gallery. The press just made this public with the headlines: The paintings of La Ballena have been stolen! And with good reason, as this theft sets a precedent in the annals of those who, at least until now, had honestly gone about looting private property. But had they ever stolen an informalist painting before? What use could they have for paintings that are good for nothing and whose value is unmistakably dubious? Certainly, the success of informalism has helped to refine the taste of the thieves. The most expensive object stolen was the old lock on the door. No money was stolen. El Techo de la Ballena was left intact, without a crack. And, as if filled with indignation, La Ballena vomited up Jonah once more, and its stomach became empty once again.56

Traditional media picked up the news and printed it along with deceptive photographs provided by El Techo that helped to reinforce the veracity of the robbery. One of La Esfera de la cultura’s pieces on the incident, “Nuevos Cuadros Llevarán para Inaugurar esta

55 “Finalmente, y cuando el público comenzaba a morir por asfixia, fue lanzado subrepticiamente el volante-catálogo-manifiesto.” Ibid.

56 “ÚLTIMA HORA: Hemos tenido que retirar un reportaje gráfico sobre max ernst, que insertábamos en esta misma página, para informar sobre el audaz robo cometido en nuestra galería. La prensa acaba de destacarlo a grandes titulares: ¡los cuadros de la ballena han sido sustraídos! Y no era para menos, puesto este robo sienta un precedente en el historial de quienes se habían dedicado honestamente al saqueo de la propiedad privada. ¿pero acaso han robado alguna vez obras del informalismo? ¿qué uso pueden dar a arte que no sirve para nada? ciertamente, el éxito del informalismo ha contribuido a refinar el gusto de los ladrones. El objeto más costoso sustraído fue el viejo candado de la puerta, nada de dinero. [el espacio de] el techo de la ballena quedó intacto y, como si lleno de indignación hubiera vomitado a Jonás, el estómago de la ballena quedó otra vez vacío.” El Techo de la Ballena, “Última hora,” rayado sobre el techo: letras, humor, pintura, no. 1, (Caracas: Ediciones de El Techo de la Ballena, March 24 1961). Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 1, box 1 and 32). For translation, see note (ii) of Calzadilla, “Terrible evidence,” in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 270−73, 272.

Noche Galería de Informalistas,” expressed solidarity with the balleneros by citing Carlos

Contramaestre who, acting as spokesperson for the group, invited “…all criminals, those

noble offenders, guilty or not of perpetuating this theft, who love art” to that night’s

opening reception (fig. 2.20).57 Once El Techo’s hoax became known, the group took

advantage of the negative publicity to denounce Informalism openly: “Whatever the

outcome or the nature of this theft may be, we should not be alarmed. The works won’t go

very far (to the Guaire River) since Informalism will soon have passed.”58 Their symbolic

sinking into Caracas’ main (but heavily polluted) waterway foretold the group’s surmised

demise of the artistic tendency.

This same strategy to disrupt Caracas’s cultural establishment carried across in all of the works included in Para la restitución del magma. With such titles as

Contramaestre’s Himen de la ballena [The Whale’s Hymen], Luque’s Cantos glúteos

[Gluteal Cantos], or González’s Sopa de fieles [Soup of the Faithful] (see fig. 2.16b), they set the general tone for the exhibition. As Irazábal’s production illustrates, at a formal aesthetic level, Informalism initially allowed El Techo to “return to mankind’s origin as

57 “Contramaestre informó a esta redacción el interés del grupo por la asistencia a la galería de todos los delincuentes, los nobles delincuentes —hayan participado o no en el robo de las telas— que amen la pintura.” Anonymous, “Nuevos Cuadros Llevarán para Inuagurar esta Noche Galería de Informalistas,” La Esfera de la cultura (Caracas) (March 24, 1961): n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 130, box 23). See also “En el Conde: Sustraídos Cuadros de Galería Informalista. Telas de Cruxent, de Contramaestre y de Quintana Castillo, se hallan entre las desaparecidas,” published by La Esfera on March 2, 1961 upon initial knowledge of the alleged theft of El Techo’s works.

58 “Cualquiera puede ser el éxito o el carácter del robo, no debemos preocuparnos. Las obras no irán a parar muy lejos (al Guaire): pues el informalismo pronto habrá pasado.” El Techo de la Ballena, “Última hora,” 272.

the problem of the image…”59 More importantly, however, adherence to the tendency provided a platform from which to launch its attack against the cultural status quo. In a

“Pre-Manifesto” (which first appeared in La Esfera in March 1961), a few days before the exhibition-event opened, its members had declared: “What we want is to breathe vitality into the placid environment of what is called national culture.”60 As with the aesthetic qualities of the works on display, the language of the group’s foundational texts was not, in itself, something new. However, the whole “package” of Para la restitución del magma—the subject matter and titles of the works, the performative aspects of the opening party, the content of the accompanying publication—brought to the fore an unheard of tension between El Techo’s formal adherence to Informalism and its broader, more ambitious, political and anti-aesthetic imperatives.

Dénouement: Opening the Floodgates

In August 1964, Calzadilla recanted El Techo’s earlier adoption of Informalism through the editorial “La terrible prueba,” published in the third number of their publication rayado sobre el techo. The text foreshadowed a turning point where the pertinence of art,

59 “Un retorno a las fuentes del hombre como problema de la imagen, y la heroicidad pesimista de la personalidad solitaria es rápidamente envuelta en un tejido romántico para otorgar aureola de trágicos a figuras como Wols y Pollock, el gran hipnotizador del momento, que considera redes cósmicas en su obra para dimensionar el abismo humano a través de una técnica pictórica que se emplea a fondo, a escala de un discurso gestualizador.” Calzadilla, “Prólogo,” xvi−xvii.

60 “No pretendemos situarnos bajo ningún signo protector; queremos, eso sí, insuflar vitalidad al plácido ambiente de lo que se llama la cultura nacional. Para ello no escatimaremos ningún medio que nos sea propicio.” Originally appeared untitled in La Esfera (Caracas) (25 March 1961); reprinted in Sardio (Caracas) no. 8 (May−June 1961): 136−38; and included as “Pareciera que todo intento de renovación” in Rama, Antología, 49−50. This translation by Laura Pérez appeared in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 256−58.

and Informalism by and large, was questioned as the group radicalized its stance. The artist

and critic condemned the formulaic approach and complacency with the institutions of

cultural and economic power that diluted its initial political efficacy:

Informalism has no place in a city where peaceful coexistence can only be strictly interpreted as a funerary act, nor was it destined to survive any longer than it takes a beached whale to die during the dry season on the beaches of Miranda State. A city where life insurance policies are basic necessities, where existence becomes an open barrage of machine-guns ready to turn bodies into smoking sieves…And it also isn’t humorous that democracy cleaned the slate of the art market, transforming painters into vendors of withered flowers, exhibitions into cultural events, and museums into amusement parks for wealthy fathers who have no place to take their kiddies on Sundays.61

Several issues were at stake in this crucially uncertain time for El Techo merely three years after its establishment. On the aesthetic front, by 1964 it had become apparent that

Informalism could no longer serve as the capstone for a seminal moment in Venezuelan art

when, its members had thought, the local scene would finally awaken from years of official

laissez-faire. Certainly, much like geometric-abstraction years earlier, its own commercial

and institutional popularity had worn it down.62 Calzadilla lamented how in the span of a

61 “En una ciudad en donde la coexistencia pacífica debe interpretarse estrictamente como un acto mortuorio, el informalismo no tenía lugar ni tampoco estaba llamado a sobrevivir más tiempo del que requiere para morir una ballena varada durante la estación seca, en las playas del Estado Miranda. Una ciudad en donde las pólizas de vida son artículos de primera necesidad, en donde la existencia se convierte en un receptivo ametrallamiento, listo para hacer de un cuerpo una criba ahumada…Como no es humorismo que la democracia haya hecho tabla rasa del mercado de cuadros, transformando a los pintores en vendedores de flores marchitas, las exposiciones en actos culturales y los museos en parques de atracciones para padres de familia acomodada que no tienen donde llevar los niñitos el domingo.” Juan Calzadilla, “La terrible prueba,” rayado sobre el techo 3: 24−26. Translated, with my modifications, as “Terrible evidence” in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 270−73, 271−72.

62 In many respects, the Venezuelans’ change of position mirrors the disdain that Alberto Grecco and the Arte Destructivo group [Kenneth Kemble et. al] felt towards the version of Informalism that became commercially popular in Argentina following the collapse of the regime of Juan Domingo Perón in 1955. See: Giunta, Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics; Jorge López Anaya, La vanguardia informalista. Buenos Aires 1957-1965 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Alberto Sendrós, 2003); Mercedes Casanegra, org., Nueva Figuración 1961-1965. Deira-Macció-Noé-de la Vega. El estallido de la pintura (Buenos Aires: MNBA,

few years, Informalism had “unmasked itself […as] a blasphemy whose fruits are not visible simply because they have already been buried. Or a slogan snatched from us to further the dictatorship’s cause.”63 Much like in Franco’s Spain, unbeknown to its practitioners, Informalism had been co-opted as the hallmark for a faltering national project. “La terrible prueba” was a wake-up call for El Techo: the momentum generated by increased access to a neutralizing (and often also ambiguous) international art circuit was now directly threatening the endurance of its own political undertaking.64

Compounding on this rather dire situation, on the national stage, Venezuela’s guerilla movement had suffered several important defeats and retreated to the rural areas to reorganize. At the same time, a number of key ballenero sympathizers were detained, imprisoned, or forced into exile (Adriano González León and his wife Mary Ferrero, Daniel

González, and Ángel Luque among them) and their activities curtailed.65 Owing perhaps

2010); and Cristina Rossi, Grupo sí: el informalismo platense de los ’60 (La Plata, Argentina: Centro Cultural Borges, 2001).

63 “[El Informalismo] pasó la prueba y dejó su pelambre de material en la alambrada de púas. Una blasfemia cuyos frutos no están a la vista simplemente porque ya han sido enterrados. O una consigna arrebatada para la causa de una dictadura.” Calzadilla, “La terrible prueba,” 25; translation from “Terrible Evidence,” 271−72.

64 For an entire generation of combative Latin American artists that also included Jacobo Borges as well as kinetic artist Julio Le Parc and Nueva Figuración painters Luis Felipe Noé and Jorge de la Vega from Argentina, this tension resulted in an existential crisis that culminated—in the case of all of them except Le Parc, who renounced art to make political activism—in their prolonged absence from artmaking. For more on Borges during this period see: María C. Gaztambide, “The Dialectic of Jacobo Borges: Reconciling Aesthetics and Politics in the Early 1970s,” in Intersecting Modernities: Latin American Art from the Brillembourg Capriles Collection, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/International Center for the Arts of the Americas, distributed by Yale University Press, 2013), 192−97.

65 See note 46 in this chapter.

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to El Techo’s partial disintegration, the more successful artists and writers within the

group—namely Morera, Irazábal, and even González León, whose literary work was

increasingly more read at this time—began to pay more attention to their individual

projects than to collective actions.

Those that remained fully committed to El Techo objectives, however, and certainly

new recruits such as Dámaso Ogaz from Chile (who collaborated with the group in 1962

but formally joined in 1967), radicalized their already militant postures and artistic

practices.66 Following the turn towards increased militancy—that is to say, the

reaffirmation of an outcome that had been foretold by the group’s publications since their

inception—El Techo more purposefully assumed the reality of an ascending social body of

peasant and provincial stock that had made its way to Caracas at the height of the oil boom

years. By the middle part of the sixties, the group more wholeheartedly turned to “art

terrorism” as its principal modus operandi. Inscribed outside of a formal artistic style or movement, or—more accurately, betwixt and between a number of aesthetic tendencies that fulfilled certain aspects of a larger social focus—this strategy emerged from the field of both collective action and civic engagement.67 It was, foremost, a matter of attitude: to

66 In 1962, El Techo de la Ballena published Espada de doble filo, a book of poems by Ogaz and illustrated by Carlos Contramaestre. Dámaso Ogaz, Espada de doble filo (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, Colección Sir Walter Raleigh, August 1962).

67 The Paris-based Argentinean artist Julio Le Parc adopted a similar position in the late 1960s. In the catalogue for the II Bienal Internacional de Arte Coltejer (Medellín, 1971), Le Parc described the juncture in light of the tension between artists who sustained the art system [through the adoption of internationalizing modalities] and those who, through their [political] activity and position, “sought to make it explode, searching for apertures, changes.” Julio Le Parc in Beverly E. Adams, “Locating the International: Art of Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2000), 231−32. In 1968, Le Parc said of that moment: “Yo no quería que el clima de feria, de diversión, de espontaneidad que podía notarse entre los visitantes (la mayor parte no especializados) de mis exposiciones, fuera asimilado a la actitud del visitante habitual de museos y de exposiciones.” Julio Le Parc, “¿Guerrilla Cultural?,” Paris

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question the prevailing social structures with the explicit intention of coordinating

concerted efforts that would create disruptions in the system.

1968, in Manifiestos argentinos. Políticas de lo visual, 1900-2000, ed. Rafael Cippolini (Córdoba, Argentina: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2003), 378−82, 378.

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CHAPTER 3 – WHY THE WHALE?1

…el Techo [de la Ballena] quiere decir el mar. Es la superficie del mar que es infinita.

—Gonzalo Castellanos2

Pero también esa ballena es nuestra ciudad, en la cual no hubo masturbatorio para el loco. …esta ciudad, Caracas, es del mar y de los océanos, y por más que se haya interpuesto el Ávila, siempre hemos respirado aire de mar, y porque siendo ella del mar, y perteneciendo nosotros a él, tenemos la evidencia de que algún cataclismo —norma de conducta de la tierra— permita el ejercicio del baile de la ballena sobre nuestras tumbas.

—Caupolicán Ovalles, 19643

The name el techo de la ballena (the roof of the whale) was perhaps the ultimate stand-in for the group that adopted it as its sobriquet in the sixties. El Techo de la Ballena did not merely circumscribe its meaning to a comfortable zoological context, but rather

1 The title for this chapter comes from Adriano González León’s paradigmatic text, “¿Por qué la ballena?,” the group’s third manifesto that appeared in rayado sobre el techo 3, published in August 1964.

2 Gonzalo Castellanos in Sobre El Techo de la Ballena, documentary by G2. Grupo Creativo, directed by Luis Alejandro Rodríguez, produced by Humberto Galvis and Luis Chacón (release date unknown), multiple dates of access, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Ian7EnVpc.

3 Caupolicán Ovalles, “Contraseñas,” rayado 3: 28−9; in Rama, Antología, 67−71.

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contained within it its contradictory desires to harness the past and unsettle the present.

Adriano González León wrote about the conundrum in “¿Por que la ballena?,” El Techo’s

third manifesto published in 1964:

Why the whale?…Because it would have been easy to choose the caiman [embraced by Cuba]. Because the dandified aesthetes would have chosen the seahorse. And also because the whale is between kindness and horror, subjected to the pull of both heaven and earth, with her dignified belly laughing at Jonah and swallowing an oil tanker. Extending itself from one end of the earth to the other, the whale is almost the earth itself, or the tiny bird that pecks at the cavity of the tooth in which fish swim about… The push toward the unknown may strengthen our reason for living and for polluting our tools with a corrosive substance that will change life and transform society.4

For the group “the whale” and its roof “the sea” implied among other things the top of nonsense, the apex of criticism, the climax of chance, the culmination and deception of old lies such as art, or even the violent need to shock. In sum, it was both a sea of its unconstrained compulsions as well as the site from where these forces emerged.

In this chapter, I examine how the collective established links with the symbolism, print culture, and literary models of a European past that they embraced as their own.5 As

4 “¿Por qué la ballena?…Porque hubiera sido fácil elegir el caimán. O porque hubiera sido de señoritos estetas elegir el hipocampo. Y también porque la ballena está en el medio de la bondad y el horror, sujeta a todas las solicitaciones del mundo y el cielo, con su vientre dignísimo que se ríe de Jonás y engulle un tanquero de petróleo, toda extendida de uno a otro extreme de la tierra, que casi es la tierra misma o es el pájaro minúsculo que picotea su diente careado en el cual nadan los peces. […] Ese empuje hacia lo desconocido que puede acrecentarnos la razón de vivir y contaminar los instrumentos de una substancia corrosiva que cambie la vida y transforme la sociedad.” González León, “¿Por qué la ballena?,” 4; translation (with my modifications) from González León, “Why the Whale?,” 269.

5 One of the distinguishing characteristic of the Latin American historical avant-gardes, even those that emerged after its nineteenth-century Wars of Independence from Europe, was their persistent dialogue with Old World modernities. The transmittal of the contours and defining parameters of such a two-way project was far from monolithic; neither Europe was the exclusive (active) emissary nor was Latin America its (passive) receptor. On the complicated hierarchical difference and asymmetrical power relationships that have been implicit in stereotypical representations of non-Western societies as part of the West’s own “self- fashioning as an imperial power,” see: Coronil, The Magical State, 14 or, also by Coronil, “Beyond

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I argue, the figure of the whale served as an allegory for an accumulative practice

characterized by the juxtaposition of fragmented and disarticulated elements. It became

the metaphorical inside-out space (the literal environment within the whale’s entrails) from

which the group’s multifarious practice took shape. That is to say, the whale represented

a milieu in the French sense of the term, which brought together space and society in a state of permanent contingency.6 El Techo reinforced this spatial connection through a sea of

disparate elements that included the kennings of olden Scandinavian literature (distilled by

Jorge Luis Borges), engravings from the Age of Exploration, and strategies borrowed from contemporaneous print media. Some may argue that its peremptory archeological (almost revivalist) concern with the past was muddled (or perhaps even lost) in a literary and graphic output that took on the structural characteristics of modern graphic design, advertising, and branding. Far from a paradox, the strategy was just one of the many disjointed elements through which the collective expressed an expansive oppositional stance against Venezuela’s fast absorption into the bowels of global capitalism. I contend that El Techo did not use these methods of mass communication to serve capital. Rather, as in nearby Cuba whose own Heroic Period was in full swing following the 1962 Missile

Crisis, they comprised the backbone of deliberate critical reflections on international

Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 1 (February 1996): 51−87.

6 I am interested in how Georges Canguilhem (1904−95) followed the early treatises of Lamarck (1744−1829) on evolution in suggesting how the absence of an intrinsic harmony between living beings and their surroundings resulted in a mutual process of (violent) adaptation. Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” Grey Room (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 03 (Spring 2001): 6−31, 8.

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capitalistic structures, particularly those that were firmly in place in Venezuela at that time.7

Kennings

This name that El Techo selected for itself reflected knowledge of Jorge Luis

Borges’ (1899−1986) pioneering work with Old Norse and Germanic literature. Capable as he was as a translator, Borges filtered and digested this Northern European literary tradition for Latin American audiences through two capstone publications: Las Kennigar

(1933) and Antiguas literaturas germánicas (1951).8 Contramaestre brought a copy of this last work with him to Spain in 1956 when he entered medical school at the Universidad de

Salamanca. “There I found texts that impressed me a great deal and which were something like the indirect poetry of the ancient Germans.”9 To wit, he encountered kennings, literary tropes that employed metaphorical compounds of several words to supplant a concrete

7 Here I must clarify that El Techo used the graphic arts to criticize a government that was falling short on its promises while the poster movement that emerged in Cuba was inscribed wholly within the euphoria and optimism of the early stages of the revolutionary process.

8 In the thirteenth century, the Icelandic scholar and historian Snorri Sturluson (1179−1241) recorded a number of kennings in the second part of the Prose Edda, circa 1220—also known as the Younger Edda or Snorri's Edda. This second part—titled Skáldskaparmál (or “language of poetry”—is a collection of four sections interspersed with excerpts from earlier archaic Scandinavian poetry containing tales from Nordic mythology. It is likely that Borges’ translations are based on Sturluson’s work. The Argentinean writer had cultivated an interest in this material over his long career, initially publishing a volume in 1933 with his Spanish translations of ancient kennings from the Old Norse, Las Kennigar. Then, in 1951, he followed it with Antiguas literaturas germánicas, an expanded anthology of ancient Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Old German literatures See, by Borges: Las Kennigar (Buenos Aires: A. Colombo, 1933) and Antiguas literaturas germánicas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951).

9 “Allí había unos textos que a mí me impresionaron mucho y que eran algo así como la poesía indirecta de los antiguos germanos.” Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 140.

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single-word concept. For example, in the Old Norse and later Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon

traditions, poetic transmutations allowed the sea to become any one in a series of phrases

that carried the same meaning: “the roof of the whale,” “swan-land,” “Viking’s country,”

“chain of islands,” or “whale-path” as in Beowulf.10

Contramaestre understood kennings as forms of identifying with nature. Of the

metaphors, he later recalled:

The Old Germans began, like the gods, to name things so that things ‘could be.’ Things existed. What didn’t exist were the words to name them. With respect to the sea as a name, for instance, [the Word] did not exist, but they knew the whale and the concept of the top, the roof. Then the sea became ‘roof of the Whale.’ All those beautiful phrases became grafted onto my memory. For me, more than metaphors, these were things that broke with all imagination, fantastic things. From there, then, the name Techo de la Ballena…11

Antiguas literaturas germánicas made such a lasting impression on him that by the end of

the decade, as he and Caupolicán Ovalles planned their return to Venezuela, it became

apparent that of all the names that they contemplated for their group—la iguana ebria [the drunken iguana] was another—el techo de la ballena could best embody their ambitious program. Ultimately, as Edmundo Aray observed, “the oceanic inebriation” of Borges’ metaphor had a limitless connotation that “was complicit with [the work of] Lautreamont,

10 The Prelude to Beowulf reads: “for he waxed under welkin, in wealth he throve, till before him the folk, both far and near, who house by the whale-path, heard his mandate, gave him gifts: a good king he!” See: Beowulf, trans. Francis B. Gummere (Cambridge: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910).

11 “Eran formas de identidad con la naturaleza. Los germanos empezaron, como los dioses, a nombrar las cosas para que las cosas ‘fueran.’ Las cosas existían. Lo que no existía eran las palabras para nombrarlas. Con respecto al mar como nombre, por ejemplo, éste no existía, pero conocían la ballena y un concepto de tope, de techo. Entonces el mar se llamó ‘techo de la Ballena.’ Todas esas frases hermosas quedaron grabadas en mi memoria. Para mí, más que metáforas, eran cosas que rompían con toda la imaginación, cosas fantásticas. De allí, entonces, el nombre Techo de la Ballena…” Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 140.

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Rimbaud, the best Artaud, Archimboldo, Sade, Dadá, Breton;” all of them key referents

for the group that eventually coalesced in Caracas.12

Containment

A number of cultures have traditionally understood the whale as an embodiment

for the world, the human body, and even the grave. It is widely regarded as an essential

symbol containing and often also concealing within it the whole of the formal, physical

universe as it is known to mankind. In this sense, whales represent the progress of the

world across a sea of unformed realities or of worlds dissolved or yet unformed, or of the

primordial oceans. That is, whales evoke the anarchic dynamism which preceded the

creation of the cosmos and the emergence of order. As the Spanish poet Juan Eduardo

Cirlot wrote, whales are the symbolic equivalent of the mystic mandorla, the vesica piscis

marauding at the intersection of the circles of heaven and earth, which both comprises and embraces the opposites of existence (life and death, heaven and earth, good and evil) and in which Jesus is often represented.13 The duality is evident in the woodcut illustrating

González León’s “¿Por qué la ballena?” and Ovalles’ “Contraseñas” (figs. 3.1a-b), both

published in the third rayado sobre el techo from August 1964. Its source is Sea-monsters

and strange animals that in the Midnight Lands are found in the sea and on land by Hans

12 “A todas estas los señoritos discutían entre la iguana ebria y el techo de la ballena. Triunfó Jorge Luis Borges y la metáfora de los balleneros: el océano es el techo de la ballena. La ebriedad oceánica comulgaba con Lautreamont, Rimbaud, el mejor Artaud, Archimboldo, Sade, Dadá, Breton. Para colmo, los delirios del Capitán Ahab persiguiendo a la muerte, dígase la ballena blanca, consunción de la existencia.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 126.

13 J[uan]. E[duardo]. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (1962; translation London: Routledge, 1971), 107, 370.

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Rudolf Manuel Deutsch (1525−71), originally printed in Sebastian Münster’s (1488–1552)

Cosmographia universalis (1544), the earliest known description of the world (fig. 3.2).

In these as in other print sources, the evil nature of a biblical Leviathan had to do with its

capacity to devour other beings—an activity that occupied many of Deutsch’s creatures in

the engraving—and was analogous to the earth’s final swallowing up of man after his

death, that is, to the dissolution of the human body.

The idea carried over to the Old Testament story of Jonah and the Whale and to

Moby-Dick (1851), which the balleneros often invoked through direct literary nods to

Herman Mellville (1819−91), Moby Dick, and Captain Ahab of the Nantucket whaler

Pequod.14 El Techo’s interest in the misfortunes of Captain Ahab, whose dislike towards

Moby Dick cost him his life in their final encounter, was met with frequent literary and

visual invocations of the man-eating aspect of the cetacean. The poem “el Gran Magma”

(1961) that was presumably written by Contramaestre who often wrote under that sobriquet

proclaimed how the group’s naming kenning was:

…more than a name

under their binding, all things will have a point of union with the ungraspable such is the meaning discovered in what the whale has devoured in the skin of the iguana15

14 See, among many references, Caupolicán Ovalles’ poem “Carta a Ahab,” rayado sobre el techo 1: verso; also in Rama, Antología, 52; Juan Calzadilla’s poem, “Descendiente de Ahab,” published in Dictado por la jauría (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, October 1962), 8−13. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 9, box 22); or Carlos Contramaestre, “Mixtificaciones de la ballena,” rayado sobre el techo 2 (May 1963). This last text also appears in Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 285−86.

15 “…el techo de la ballena es más que un nombre bajo su ligamen todas las cosas tendrán un punto de unión con lo inasible tal es el sentido que se descubre en lo que la ballena ha devorado en la piel de la iguana[.]” [Carlos Contramaestre], “el gran magma,” in rayado no. 1, verso; also in Rama, Antología, 51. Translated by Laura Pérez as “the great magma (first manifesto)” in Jiménez, Boulton and his contemporaries, 264−65.

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The poem then upturned the analogy of the whale’s consumptive capacity by following up those lines with a reference to how, on the aesthetic front, the members of El Techo executed equally savage actions:

on the surface of the painting devoured by its own matter the almanacs do not register everything that can be said about the whale it is cosmic hunger demanding its scream it is a gesture it is an attitude just like popular singers, el techo de la ballena will enjoy extraordinary popularity16

Borges wrote in Antiguas literaturas germánicas that in Anglo-Saxon bestiaries gigantic

monsters from all times always tended towards gluttony, unmeasured feeding, cannibalism,

and unnatural or excessive alimentation.17 El Techo underscored an interest in this bestial

dimension through the repeated use of the sixteenth-century woodcut Whale eating men, also from Münster’s Cosmographia, which represented the actual moment when a great whale impiously devoured its human prey (fig. 3.3). The group used the print as a detail in rayado sobre el techo no. 2 (May 1963) and again as the principal image for En uso de

16 “en la superficie de la pintura devorada por su propia material los almanaques no registran todo lo que puede decirse acerca de la ballena es el hambre cósmica exigiendo su grito es un gesto es una actitud el techo de la ballena al igual que los cantantes de moda gozará de una extraordinaria popularidad[.]” [Contramaestre], “el gran magma,” verso.

17 Jorge Luis Borges in Brioso Santos, Estridencia e ironía, 56. El Techo members made a similar connection between their drive for renewal and the idea of the ingestion of aesthetics in their foundational text “Las instituciones de cultura nos roban el oxígeno,” which appeared as “Pre-Manifesto” in the eighth and final issue of Sardio (June 1961). On that occasion, they wrote: “Art in our times is tragic; it constantly devours itself and continues to do so with every new attempt, much like [the Ouroboros (or Uroborus)] the serpent devouring its own tail that was once a symbol of alchemy. We want to express ourselves, only to express ourselves. To reach this essential objective we renounce every cliché that might be attributed to us; other sources provide the quality or insignificance of the forms and aspirations that drive us.” El Techo de la Ballena, “Las instituciones de cultura nos roban el oxígeno,” La esfera (Caracas), March 25, 1961; “Pre- Manifesto,” Sardio (Caracas), no. 8 (May-June 1961), 136−38. Also in Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 8−9. Translated as “Pre-Manifesto” in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 256−58.

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razón (July 1963), the foldout for Ovalles’ poem that Aray and Rodolfo Izaguirre designed

(fig. 3.4 a-b). As in Whale eating men, both works depicted a fanged whale-creature

swallowing the last breath from a man whose arms are raised, as if clamoring for his life.

For added drama, however, in El Techo’s vertical rearrangements the misfortunate soul

who runs away on the original appeared to plunge down an abyss into which he too would,

presumably, face a mortal fate.

The redemptive associations of the whale also appealed to El Techo. Cetaceans

have often served as allegories for the Christian dogma of resurrection, particularly so in

those stories like Jonah’s where its swallowed victims evade death by living inside it and

eventually escaping.18 The poem “el Gran Magma” proclaimed: “el techo de la ballena is a stone animal that resurrects the world for the wellbeing of its guests.”19 The engraving

St. Brendan’s whale by Wolfgang Kilian (1581–1662), which El Techo (or perhaps their

French source) christened as “La messe sur la baleine” [To Hear Mass on the Whale] (fig.

3.5), conveyed the same concept. The image represents the improbable celebration of a

Christian mass atop the back of a whale (a whale island, perhaps?) somewhere between

Spain and the hump of Africa to the East and the Canaries to the West.20 It depicts Saint

18 Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 80.

19 “el techo de la ballena es un animal de piedra que resucita el mundo para bienestar de sus huéspedes.” [Contramaestre], “el gran magma,” verso; translation from “the great magma (first manifesto),” 264−65.

20 The Carta Marina (1539) by Olaus Magnus (1490−1557) heads this warning:—“The Whale hath upon its Skin a superficies, like the gravel that is by the sea side; so that oft times when he raiseth his back above the waters, Sailors take it to be nothing else but an Island, and sayl unto it, and go down upon it, and they strike in piles upon it, and fasten them to their ships: they kindle fires to boyl their meat; until at length the Whale feeling the fire, dives down to the bottome; and such as are upon his back, unless they can save

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Brendan of Clonfert (c. 484−c. 577), an Irish missionary appropriately known as “the

Voyager,” commanding the oars of a boat leading two other monks to the legendary

Fortunate Isles [Insuale Fortunatae or Isles of the Blessed] at the bottom left of the

engraving. His passengers’ bowed heads indicate the resolute acceptance of their next post

at that winterless earthly paradise in Celtic mythology reserved for reincarnated souls.

Kilian’s engraving thus established a visual nexus between the seafaring life embraced by

European whalers and the massive campaigns of evangelization carried forth by the

Mendicant orders since the beginning of Christianity.

El Techo members understood their own renovatory praxis as an endeavor that was

similar, in ambition and difficulty, to the European whaling and proselytizing enterprises

that preceded them in the Americas. St. Brendan’s whale first appeared in the

invitation/catalogue for the exhibition Exposición tubular held in July 1963 in support of

Ovalles, who was exiled in Colombia, at the Galería-Librería Ulises in Sabana Grande

(Caracas) (fig. 3.6). The print made a symbolic comeback in Salve, Amigo Salve, y Adiós

of July 1968, which was one of El Techo’s last publications. Here, its purple monochrome

version illustrated farewell statements by Aray, Hurtado, Calzadilla, Ogaz, Contramaestre

and other collaborators (fig. 3.7). In the previously cited “¿Por qué la ballena?,” González

León’s intent was not only to position the group’s work somewhere between kindness and horror, much like the whale, but perhaps more importantly, to assert their place within a

themselves by ropes thrown forth of the ship, are drown’d.” See: John Ashton, Curious Creatures in Zoology (London: John C. Nimmo, 1890), accessed March 28, 2015, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42508.

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larger pugnacious context set in the same maritime environment that served as a backdrop to “La messe sur la baleine”/St. Brendan’s whale:

A simple navigation in the waters or of the waste discarded by the Whale reveals, at least to us, the following fact: painting and poetry in our country cannot continue to be a docile amassing of honors obtained with impunity, because there are no peaceful means allowing for the so-called benefit of [fame]… EL TECHO DE LA BALLENA draws its vital pride from the disturbing blow it delivers to a pious and conformist environment...[from which] emerges the vague possibility of accessing a broader world such as that of Latin America. Subjected equally to fraud, theft, and alienation, harassed equally by the naval infantry and oil or banana corporations, all countries have undergone similar cultural fraud and a process that turns them into dunces. Those responsible are, for a variety of reasons, the [submissive] entreguistas [defeatists] and the servile, as well as those who believe in the inviolable power of dogmas.21

Through this rhetoric, El Techo also openly rejected Latin America’s less than equitable system of predatory capitalism and its cultural and economic dependency on Europe and the United States.22 But, it also underscored the politics of repression that, on the home

21 “Una simple navegación por el agua botada o los desechos dejados por la BALLENA, significa, al menos para nosotros, el encuentro con una certidumbre: la pintura y la poesía en nuestro país no podrán seguir siendo un manso escalonamiento de honores, que se obtiene impunemente, pues no hay vías pacíficas que permitan el llamad[o] disfrute de la consagración. Todos los títulos, los documentos, los apellidos, las influencias, los conciliábulos, los premios, prodúzcanse ellos en las escuelas universitarias, en los museos o en las casas de los mecenas, no adquieren por so su única solvencia y están sometidos a una vigilante línea de fuego. De este soplo perturbador, introducido en un medio beato y conformista, de no haber otras realizaciones, EL TECHO DE LA BALLENA extrae su orgullo vital. Y de ahí parte una posibilidad aproximativa hacia un mundo más amplio como el de América Latina. Sometidos por igual al fraude, el robo y la alienación, igualmente hostigados por los infantes de marina y las compañías petroleras o bananeras, en todos los países se cumple por igual un proceso de imbecilización y trampa a la cultura, del cual son culpables los entreguistas que han creído en la fuerza intocable de los dogmas.” González León, “¿Por qué la ballena?,” 3−4; translation (with my modifications) from González León, “Why the Whale?,” 269.

22 This passage from El Techo’s second manifesto is indicative of its members’ general sentiment towards capitalism. They were not averse to it but, rather, their opposition resided on the unequitable way in which Venezuela had been integrated into the global capitalistic system. Their critical stance recalled the watershed Prebisch–Singer hypothesis (c. 1949)—initially developed by Hans Singer (Germany, 1910−2006), but expanded by Raúl Prebisch (Argentina, 1901−86)—that ultimately became the backbone of Dependency Theory. See: John Toye and Richard Toye, “The origins and interpretation of the Prebisch- Singer thesis,” History of Political Economy 35, no. 3 (2003): 437–67.

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front, its writers and artists contested through “swishes of the tail and biting” in the same way that kindred guerilla men “risk[ed] their lives at the front, at the Sierra with a salvo of rifle shots.”23 “In our own way,” Aray recalled in a 1999 interview, “we were guerrilla fighters. Yes, guerrillas in the world of art, literature, and the politics of culture.”24

González León’s passage, moreover, reveals a closely related third dimension of the allegory inherent in El Techo’s rationale: “the whale” as a convex site for aesthetic originality. Dámaso Ogaz’s relatively late “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico” of 1967 allows us to grasp more grasp this unique understanding. Ogaz used the story of Jonah and the Whale as the basis for his thesis on lo majamámico, a lack of synchronicity that resulted in new universal truths.25 He rationalized the nature of the Jonah/Whale relationship in the following manner:

The parallelism between two coexistent worlds that resulted from Jonah’s unexpected entry inside the whale was perfect in its total lack of synchronicity [or sense]. This same lack of synchronicity created in the protagonists a succession of free, relaxed states that led to a new truth…Jonah came from a universe where all of his contemporaries were

23 “…no es por azar que la violencia estalle en el terreno social como en el artístico para responder a una vieja violencia enmascarada por las instituciones y leyes sólo benéficas para el grupo que las elaboró. De allí los desplazamientos de la Ballena. Como los hombres que a esta hora se juegan a fusilazo limpio su destino en la Sierra, nosotros insistimos en jugarnos nuestra existencia de escritores y artistas a coletazos y mordiscos.” El Techo de la Ballena, “Segundo manifiesto”, rayado sobre el techo (Caracas) no. 2 (May 1963); also in Rama, Antología, 197−99; and Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 13−17.

24 “A nuestra manera, fuimos guerrilleros. Sí guerrilleros en el mundo del arte, en el mundo de la literatura y también en el mundo de la cultura política.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 130.

25 The eponymous central character in the Book of Jonah was a prophet of the northern kingdom of Israel from about the eigth century BC who was famously described as having been swallowed by a “sea creature” that, following the convention established by the 1611 King James Bible, has since been interpreted as “a whale.” In the story, Jonah enters into conflict with Yahweh and, after a series of unfortunate events, ends up being swallowed whole by a whale. Jonah then repents for his disobedience and clamors for God’s mercy. Ultimately, Yahweh speaks to the creature, which vomits out Jonah safely on dry land after three days. See: John, 1.2−17, 2.1−10, Holy Bible. New American Standard Bible (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1999), 1110−11.

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consumed by the arduous task of deceiving each other as well as giving themselves [unduly] importance…The whale, came from an limitless tedium of prolonged digestions of jellyfishes, the silence of his kindred creatures and primal eroticism…The introduction of Jonah into [the Whale’s innermost chambers] breaks with a stable and solemn reality…26

As Ogaz’s text illustrates, El Techo’s actions consisted of “breaking the mold from the

inside.”27 That is, the group exacerbated the internal discontinuity between its pairings in

order to call attention to and trouble its assemblages’ evident incongruities.

Ogaz situated the collective in direct confrontation with a strain of cultural workers

whose conformist practice maintained the status quo. Dealing in dead matter, these

lackluster mass of thinkers or “taxidermists” pushed the agendas of the establishment,

surrendered to the prospect of an official post within the system, and subjected themselves

to the demands of an asphyxiating art market. In contrast, El Techo located its

transformative work wholly within a chaotic and unsettling environment (or lo

majamámico) that was fundamental to its disparate and often asynchronous aesthetic and

literary juxtapositions:

[Our engagement of lo majamámico] establishes the existence of an illegal and divergent reality, parallel to that of the taxidermists. In its zeal to

26 “Este paralelismo entre dos mundos coexistentes, que se produjo al introducirse imprevistamente Jonás en la Ballena, fue perfecto en su total carencia de sincronización [ni sentido]. Esta misma falta de sincronización creó en los protagonistas una sucesión de estados libres, relajatorios y propiciadores de una nueva verdad…Jonás venía de un universo donde todos sus semejantes estaban demasiado atareados en engañarse unos a otros y darse importancia entre los compañeros de impostura. La ballena, por su parte, venia del tedio ilimitado, las largas digestiones de medusas, el silencio de sus semejantes y el erotismo primariamente practicado…La introducción de Jonás hasta las barbas de la ballena rompe entonces una realidad estable y solemnizada…” Ogaz, “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico,” La ballena y lo majamámico, no. 2 of colección docencia ballenera (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1967), n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 34, box 15). Also in Rama, Antología, 206−17, 217.

27 “Nuestra verdadera forma de acción está en romper el molde desde dentro y para ello no hay fórmulas corrientes ni amables disfraces.” Ogaz, “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico,” 212.

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arrive at [this alternative reality], it adulterates and subverts the present. Majamamismo is, thus, not a social byproduct but rather an illegal reality, an act of defiance.28

In the same way that Jonah became something entirely different inside the Whale, an

engagement of lo majamámico transformed reality into a contingent space that El Techo

often represented as the whale.

At the same time that lo majamámico served as justification for its politicized

praxis, it also allowed El Techo to define more precisely the characteristics of its

oppositional pronouncements. Ogaz extended the Jonah/Whale metaphor to El Techo’s

own production by outlining how collective actions could be structured as convex

assemblages; as inside-out operations [acciones desde dentro] mirroring the tale from the

Scriptures. He conveyed this fundamental concept through the cover image that he chose

for the pamphlet La ballena y lo majamámico that El Techo also published in a postcard

series of 1967 (fig. 3.8). In the print, titled Esquema majamámico de uso profiláctico,

Ogaz superimposed a stylized fish-whale over the upper torso of a skeletal

anthropomorphic figure. Man and fish appear merged into a single unintelligible creature

dominated by its fish-head, yet grounded by its human legs. The image was the artist’s

elemental composition of a man who, like Jonah through his captivity within the Whale’s

bowels, made amends.

28 “El majamamismo establece la existencia de una realidad ilegal, paralela a la de los taxidermistas, pero divergentes. En su afán consciente por llegar a ella, adultera la realidad presente y la subvierte. Por ello, el majamamismo no es un subproducto social, sino una realidad ilegal, un desafío.” Ogaz, “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico,” La ballena y lo majamámico, no. 2 of colección docencia ballenera (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1967), n/p. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 34, box 15). Also in Rama, Antología, 217.

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Juan Calzadilla explained in the perfunctory essay to Los métodos y las deserciones imaginarias, which Ogaz wrote in Paris in 1963 and published in Caracas in 1968, how he developed the notion of la visión desigual [unequal vision] that sought the same essential outcome as his inside-out operations. By transmuting exterior events to the interior of the self, Calzadilla argued, Ogaz turned poetic and visual images into independent entities that

“grow and act on their own within the body, yet simultaneously hinge upon those external stimuli.”29 Such images, Calzadilla went on to say, “are unbridled from the reign of the

mind and of the senses…language [thus] becomes a strange monster, a body-like and soft

structure [akin] to an out-of-control and enormous telephone exchange station.”30 In other

words, that Ogaz’s particular juxtapositions of previously disarticulated elements resulted

in cohesive (if erratic) new significances that extended beyond their originary contexts.

This strategy contrasted with Surrealism’s less mindful and more arbitrary

assemblages of objects. Ogaz wrote in “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico” that “the

29 “Cada sensación exterior se colorea por el grado de humor interno, pero lo original consiste en que ella da nacimiento a una imagen que se vuelve independiente, que crece y actúa por su cuenta dentro del cuerpo, pero que a la vez depende de estímulo externo.” Calzadilla, “Las premisas de un método antipoético,” 1968, in Rama, Antología, 221−24, 222−23. Similarly, in “Reo de putrefacción. Viaje cenestésico”—the 1964 prologue for an unrealized anthology by Calzadilla—Contramaestre defines his colleague’s poetic material as an “invitation to travel to one’s innards.” A one-way journey to meet Jonah at the whale’s entrails, a purulent territory of “gelatinous forests” and “the blood of the cetacean” resulting in “an unheard of colloidal clarity.” Carlos Contramaestre, “Reo de putrefacción. Viaje cenestésico,” rayado 3: 52; in Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 307−08.

30 “El resultado de la visión desigual es un gran excedente de imágenes que siguen actuando por sí solas, libres de control de la mente y los sentidos, y cuya independencia amenaza la normalidad del individuo quien se siente de este modo arrastrado a una atmosfera semejante a la que se reina en una campana de vidrio. La existencia está concebida como un gran laboratorio, tan confundido en sus actos como una multitud que corre después de oír la explosión. Todo es aquí, en esta poesía, antinatural y, en cierto modo, en su dosis de humor negro, está en oposición a la especie. …el lenguaje se convierte en un extraño monstruo, en una estructura corpuscular y blanda, que uno no imagina sin compararla inmediatamente con una gran central telefónica, de la que se ha perdido toda posibilidad de control.” Calzadilla, “Las premisas de un método antipoético,” 223.

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surrealists opted for an external effect produced by objects that do not engage with each other.” Calling their assemblages “too rationalized for intellectual use or pleasure,” he disavowed their less complex object-based relationships and the surrealist use of the subconscious. As an alternate strategy, Ogaz proposed to deconstruct the emblematic elements of his assemblages and to participate in illicit actions in order to bring to the fore blurred realities that the Venezuelan taxidermists branded as illegal.31 This fundamental intent had been absent from the first surrealist project:

[Even] the surrealists were incapable of breaking (or transforming) Lautréamont’s black parasol and only used its widowed integrity as another symbol. They constantly cited “Les Chants de Maldoror” [The Songs of Maldoror]… [but] it would have been necessary to break the parasol, disassemble the sewing machine, or urinate on the dissecting table just as Jonah did inside the whale, so that this iteration of the Comte de Lautréamont would have transformed itself into a Jonah-Whale act.

Paradoxically, Ogaz wrote, “those initial surrealists were within an arm’s length of the great falsifier Alfred Jarry and his exceptional exceptions.” Resonating with El Techo’s concern with regression, Ogaz continued: “It would have been enough to take a step back in order to find the unique character that would have enabled them to untie themselves from the grinding of the wheels directing life.”32 In contrast, what the Caracas-based group

31 Critical as it was of Surrealism, in this reclamation the ballenero project approximated the Freudian concept of the uncanny, which Hal Foster recognized as a principal concern for the European movement. Albeit, El Techo used it for wildly different aims in Venezuela. See Chapter 4 for more on this connection.

32 Emphasis mine. “[Hasta] los surrealistas fueron también incapaces de romper (entiéndase transformar) el negro paraguas de Lautrémont y sólo lo utilizaron en su integridad viudal como otro símbolo. Ellos citaron constantemente ‘Los Cantos de Maldoror’[…pero] hubiera sido necesario haber roto el paraguas, desarticulado la máquina de coser y haber orinado en la mesa de disección [de ‘Los Cantos de Maldoror’] como Jonás orinó dentro de la ballena, para que esta anunciación del Conde de Lautrémont se hubiera transformado en un acto Jonás-Ballena. Aquellos surrealistas de la primera época estuvieron a un paso del gran mistificador que se llamó Alfred Jarry y sus excepciones excepcionales. Hubiera bastado un paso hacia atrás para que el único personaje les hubiera ayudado a romper las ataduras que los unía al

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borrowed from the satirical French writer Alfred Jarry (1873−1907) and other historical

provocateurs besides the potential residing within the uniqueness of his irreverent character

was the notion of lo majamámico. In other words, the adulterated, erratic, deformed

version of reality that the “official bon vivants could recognize as a cancerous cell.”33

Release

El Techo predicated a key concern for the renewal of the Venezuelan cultural fabric

through a body of materials that, following a momentous inaugural season, increasingly

reflected their awareness of commercial print media strategies. Their initial publication,

rayado sobre el techo de la ballena no. 1 of March 1961 (see fig. 2.16a), featured a pen

and ink drawing of a whale that Ángel Luque designed for its cover (fig. 3.9). A number

of catalogues published in the context of solo exhibitions by most of the group at some of

the top venues for contemporary art in Caracas soon followed.34 The designs for these

publications were eclectic, perhaps owing to the diverse imperatives of the institutions involved as well as of the individual artists. Yet in late spring 1962, El Techo arrived at a

engranaje de la vida dirigida…[Los surrealistas] habían optado por el efecto externo, aquel que producen los objetos que no ensamblan entre sí….yo he visto en el surrealismo…un acto demasiado racionalizado, para uso y goce intelectual.” Ogaz, “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico,” 212.

33 “…[El majamamismo es] la búsqueda bajo lo ilegal de una realidad no deformada, no traicionada, no parcelada, en suma una célula cancerosa a los ojos del buen vivir oficial.” Ibid. See also Edmundo Aray, “La ballena ante:,” the prologue to Ogaz’s text, also from 1967. In Dámaso Ogaz, La ballena y lo majamámico, n/d; also in Rama, Antología, 204−05.

34 These exhibtions included: Daniel González (at the Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad Central on July 19, 1961), Gabriel Morera (at the Librería Ulises, September-December in 1961), Hugo Baptista (at the Museo de Bellas Artes in 1961), Ángel Luque (at the Museo de Bellas Artes in 1961 and at Galería El Muro the following year), and Fernando Irazabal (at the Sala Mendoza in March 1962).

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definitive cohesive graphic identity that they then repeated for much of the period from

1962 to 1969.

On May 1, 1962 the group published Ovalles’ controversial book of poetry

¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? (fig. 3.10). Designed by Daniel González, El Techo

replicated its format in October of that year for Juan Calzadilla’s anthology Dictado por la

jauría (figs. 3.11a-b), as well as in several other volumes published in 1963 (fig. 3.12). In

these later publications, González retained ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente?’s typeface,

two-tone design, and the overlays and flaps that differentiate content on the front and back

covers. The publications also signaled the beginning of El Techo’s definitive and firm

engagement with European print culture. Beginning with ¿Duerme usted, señor

Presidente?, the group acquired the habit of interspersing sixteenth and seventeenth- century engravings culled from quite different sources as complementary illustrations.35

For example, a reproduction of the Infernal punishment for the Seven Deadly Sins: the lustful are smothered in fire and brimstone (1496) (fig. 3.13) accompanied Ovalles’ tirade against the excesses of Rómulo Betancourt.36 Most importantly, however, El Techo’s initial use of scenes from Konrad Gerner’s Fischbuch: Der zwölfte theil von de Meertheire

35 In this case Kurt Seligmann’s Le miroir de la magie: histoire de la magie dans le monde occidental [The Magic Mirror: History of Magic in Western Culture] (Paris: Frasquelle, 1956) or another book identified on the back matter for ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? simply as Les Arts Fantastiques that could perhaps be Caude Roy’s Arts fantastiques, the second volume in the Encyclopédie Essentielle, Série Art (Paris: Robert Delpiere, 1960).

36 ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? posited its critique against Betancourt in the context of the popular roots of the AD political mass that had carried him to victory. A passage from Ovalles’ poem is telling of the extent of the politician’s betrayal: “Cuando se paga la luz, el teléfono, el gas y el agua, como un recién-nacido, entre cuidados y muelles colchones, la vieja zorra [Betancourt] duerme. Nada le hace despertar. EL PRESIDENTE vive gozando en su palacio.” Caupolicán Ovalles, ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, 1962), 4.

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of 1598 in ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? consolidated the graphic identity of its

subsequent literary production under two key emblems. On the obverse of the German bestiary’s folio 97 was a montage of the two images that the group turned to with regularity in crafting its “brand” from that point forward: on the top, a whale-like sea-monster suckling her horned young and, on the bottom, a charging great whale (fig. 3.14). Gerner himself most likely appropriated the top image from Olaus Magnus (1490−1557) who, sixty years earlier, had included a nearly identical “sea creature” on the westernmost fringes of his woodblock “D: Western Islands” of his Carta Marina (1539), beneath the island of Thule (fig. 3.15). Irrespective of its source, El Techo utilized an inverted adaptation of this particular sea monster from the ultima Thule with such frequency that it became its principal leitmotif, with the “charging whale” image coming in as a close runner up. Removed from its original print context, we see the nursing whale used on the cover of several of the volumes in the Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena series (fig. 3.16) and on

the interior of some of these very publications as a graphic resource establishing quite

different spatial values and hierarchies (figs. 3.17 a-b). The image also appeared in exhibition catalogues such as Alberto Brandt’s Falsarios eróticos, held at the Galería El

Puente from October 20 to November 10, 1966 (fig. 3.18 a-b) where it was treated as a logo. Among many examples, the “charging whale” motif was embossed on the covers of

¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? (see fig. 3.10) and Los Venenos Fieles (see fig. 3.12 on the left), as well as used on the back of Dictado por la jauría (see fig. 3.11b).

El Techo’s reliance on Gerner’s iconic whales between 1962 and its last activities

in 1968 and 1969, rivaled a well thought out advertising campaign. Yet the intent of such

a cohesive program was far from selling merchandise to an ever expanding competitive

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market. Rather, the group’s purpose was to complement the art object and, in many cases

also, to upend the notion of its “uniqueness.” As I demonstrated in the context of the

exhibition Para la restitución del magma, the group’s multidisciplinary collaborations

blurred the lines between the aesthetic and the literary. Emerging from the critical context

of the sixties when broader cultural attitudes towards authority, power, and money took a

left turn, ballenero artists considered the print materials they designed (and often also hand-

embellished) as tantamount, in aesthetic value and merit, to their artistic production. For

instance, when the group mounted the exhibition Los Tubulares in July of 1963, an entire

wall of the Galería-Librería Ulises was crowded by manipulated versions of En uso de

razón, the foldable poster illustrating Ovalles’ namesake poem (see fig. 3.4b). An extant

archival photograph from the El Techo de la Ballena Collection at MoMA reveals how

here, as in many other exhibitions, the group eschewed all hierarchies while displaying

printed matter alongside their artworks (see fig. 3.19).37

The nexus between prints and artworks reached such an extreme in Los Tubulares

that the series played a secondary role versus the more prominately displayed leaflets along

the wall. Elevated to the status of art object, posters such as the included versions of En

uso de razón often became seminal in the poetics of public display cultivated by El Techo

37 El Techo organized Los Tubulares to raise funds for Ovalles who, at the time faced an uncertain economic future in Colombia where he had sought voluntary exile following the backlash of ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? The exhibition featured tubes, drawings, and collages by Edmundo Aray, Hugo Baptista, Jacobo Borges, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Mary Ferrero and Fernando Irazábal. All proceeds were sent to Ovalles in Bogotá. Some of the works in Los Tubulares included (in lowercase): tubo consolador, tubo toilette, tubo necrofílico, tubo duodenal del gran magma, tubo adeco and tubo rectal. El Techo de la Ballena, Exposición tubular (Caracas: Galería-Librería Ulises, July 1963). Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 19, box 32).

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during their presentations. Moreover, like Marcel Duchamp before them, El Techo

circumvented marketplace forces by hosting their gatherings at a number of itinerant spaces

to exhibit (rather than exhibition spaces) that occasionally, as in this instance at the Galería-

Librería Ulises, took on the formal characteristics of Caracas’ established gallery system.38

And, like their Dada predecessor, the group widened the reach of art by offering these publications directly to the Venezuelan public at affordable or for free.39

In keeping with this fundamental concern, the importance of El Techo’s co-optation

of graphic design cannot be overlooked: up to that point, Venezuelans had understood it

merely as an aesthetic element at the service of a consumer society that they had

(unwittingly or not) vertiginously embraced. Yet the collective’s contestational printed materials heralded the emergence of a strain within the genre that turned graphic design into a critical instrument against the very culture of consumeristic excesses from which it had originated.40 El Techo’s graphic production, moreover, resonated with kindred non-

market driven proposals produced from Cuba in the early revolutionary period under the

auspices of Lunes de Revolución. El Techo was intimately familiar with the cultural

38 The group’s itinerant spaces were a way, Edmundo Aray recalled in retrospect, of calling attention to and of confronting the official forms of art creation and display as well as of questiong whitewashed museum environments. He stated: “Las primeras exposiciones de El Techo tienen la impronta del hecho plástico. De allí que hayamos escogido un garaje en El Conde, barrio de Caracas, de ámbito reducido pero de interior volcánico. Un modo de llamar la atención y de enfrentar las formas oficiales de hacer y de mostrar arte y de poner en entredicho los ámbitos asépticos de los museos.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 128.

39 In 1935, Duchamp offered his spinning Rotoreliefs (a set of six double-sided discs meant to be spun on a turntable) series directly to consumers at the Concours Lépine, an annual trade fair for French inventors.

40 Several years later, artist Luis Felipe Noé picked up on the potential of mass media advertisements as the language for a kindred critique of economic subservience in Argentina. See: Noé, Una Sociedad Colonial Avanzada (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1971).

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supplement of the Havana-based newspaper Revolución, which ran on Mondays from 1959

to 1961 under editor Guillermo Cabrera Infante. The Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes (b.

1930), author of Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), frequently published in Lunes de

Revolución and was listed as El Techo’s Havana correspondent in rayado no. 3 (August

1964).41 In 1967, El Techo included the Lunes de Revolución’s chief cartoonist, Santiago

“Chago” Armada (1937−95), in their prized postcard series with a drawing recalling the

encapsulated landscapes of the comic strips for which he is best remembered (figs. 3.20 a- b).42

El Techo de la Ballena sought to produce nothing less than a complete renewal of

Caracas’ sociocultural environment. This imperative hinged upon their engagement with

unconstrained vital force fields gathered and harnessed from many sources. Just as the

opening epigraphs of this chapter suggest, embracing the trope of el techo de la ballena

allowed the collective to enjoin such all-encompassing, and (some may argue) mutually

exclusive, productive spaces such as the (fluid/infinite) sea and the (physically defined/constrained) whale. However, the collective took advantage of the whale as a

pictorial and literary trope that gave their artistic creations physical density. In their

41 In 1965, El Techo published several of Desnoes’ texts: La Llave de los Campos, along with Roberto Matta and Max Clarac, in April and “A nivel de sus ojos,” the introductory essay for Paolo Gasparini’s book of photography Cómo son los héroes in August.

42 Chago is an anomalous figure within the Revolution. Early on he fought alongside Castro in the Sierra Maestra and from there published political cartoons in the mimeographed paper El Cubano Libre, established by Che Guevara. Although the artist was widely respected in his own time for his covert (yet staunch) criticism of the inner workings of the Revolution, following a moment of schism he was ostracized along with other revolutionary “purists” and removed from his post at Lunes de Revolución. Perhaps as a rebuttal, in 1963 he published a collection of mostly unpublished works. Chago, El humor otro (Havana: Ediciones Revolución, 1963).

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additive practice, it became analogous to that “point of union with the ungraspable”

through which the group straddled the irregularities and temporalities of the sea of life.43

It also symbolized their will to develop inside-out operations, or what Ogaz qualified as acciones desde dentro, from which to sabotage and implode the system. The hallmark of such a strategy required the construction of an innovative bond between visual and literary elements that, through their outright lack of synchronicity, generated unheard-of universal truths. By adopting the allegorical emblem of the whale and associated print and seafaring literary traditions, El Techo galvanized a brand-new axiology where shock value and the arcane were inexorably intertwined.

43 [Contramaestre], “el gran magma,” verso; “the great magma (first manifesto),” 264−65.

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CHAPTER 4 – THE AUTHORITY OF KITSCH

Tenga fe. Mire un poco, Y espere Que —como dijo Rómulo Gallegos— las cosas vuelven al lugar de donde salieron. Y así puede suceder que, buscando lo cursi encuentre usted en sí mismo una mina fantástica de cursilería. No olvide usted que Venezuela es un país minero. Como tampoco olvide que es un país agricultor: la mata de la cursilería, como quien dice.1

—Sofía Ímber, May 1961

In 1854, the diplomat and educator Manuel Antonio Carreño Muñoz (1812−74) published Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras, a text that codified rules of etiquette for the Venezuelan bourgeoisie.2 Yet the country’s sociopolitical elites soon recognized

the pertinence of this social pedagogy and in 1855, the National Congress incorporated el

Manual de Carreño (as it is still colloquially known) into the primary school curriculum.3

Its inclusion in the broader project of modernization indicated the credence among certain

1 Sofía [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena. Homenaje a lo cursi,” Páginas (Caracas) (May 21, 1961): 16−17, 17. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 134, box 16).

2 Manuel Antonio Carreño, Compendio del Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras de Manuel Antonio Carreño. Arreglado por el mismo para el uso de las escuelas de ambos sexos (1854; reprint, Lima: Benito Gil Editor, 1875).

3 María Fernanda Lander, “El Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras de Manuel Antonio Carreño: reglas para la construcción del ciudadano ideal,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 6 (2002): 83−96, 94 (note 7).

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powerful factions that Venezuela could overcompensate for its lack of national

technological and scientific advancement through exquisite manners. By the middle

decades of the twentieth century, Carreño’s manual remained tied to a broad process of

social development based on the proselytization of social conventions developed, over

time, in far more industrialized European nations.4 This multigenerational preoccupation

with the text represented yet another instance where Venezuela consumed imported

parameters in the fabrication of an appearance of order and progress, however patchy and

incomplete; this time in the social realm.

El Techo de la Ballena threatened the national image of cultivated taste, moral

virtue, and good manners in May 1961 when it opened its second exhibition, Homenaje a

la cursilería [Tribute to tackiness]. At their gallery space in the El Conde district (Calle

Este 12, no. 240) (fig. 4.1), the group commented on national imperatives of taste and

propriety through a tripartite platform consisting of a manifesto, the display of supra-

artistic materials in a quasi-archival format, and a spectacular mise en scène. Unlike its preceding exhibition (Para la restitución del magma in March 1961) where the objects on

display remained fundamentally linked to traditional art formats, here they were culled

from Venezuela’s arduous history: torn book pages, newspaper clippings, political

photographs and propaganda, bric-à-brac, gesso statuettes, kitsch memorabilia, fishing

nets, and musical instruments. El Techo transformed these elements into wallpapered

4 As Lander states these sorts of Latin American manuals on etiquette were, for the most part, versioned or translated copies of similar materials from France and England. Ibid., 86.

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collages and table-top assemblages (fig. 4.2).5 In its radical departure from art world conventionalisms, Homenaje a la cursilería represented an early, if not the first, foray into non-objectivity in Venezuela.6 El Techo’s two-fold strategy of recovery and de- hierarchization of these everyday objects turned them into iconographic and symbolic emblems for the pomposity, ritual, and “crushing superficiality” of what it viewed as a

mediocre establishment.7 Through this double approach, El Techo de-canonized the objects on display while simultaneously denounced the instability of the broader cultural tradition of which they were part. As I argue, the group’s iconoclastic affront to bourgeois

tastes and morality fulfilled a larger imperative of provocation that was germane to the

majority of its early actions.

5 In her review of Homenaje a la cursilería, Sofía Ímber established the typology for objects that were to be found strewn throughout the exhibition: “…la sombrilla, las pantuflas, los zapatitos de niño conservador con pátina de bronce para permanente recuerdo de los felices padres. Todos esos objetos que pueden ser colocados en el límite entre lo cursi y lo pavoso.” Sofía [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena. Homenaje a lo cursi,” Páginas (Caracas), May 21, 1961: 16−17, 17. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 134, box 16).

6 My present analysis adds to Gabriela Rangel’s work on the emergence of non-pictorial experimental practices and their relative obscurity in Venezuela. As she rightfully argues, experiences such as Homenaje a la cursilería have received little critical attention since their ephemeral nature and multidisciplinary character often excluded them from institutional spaces as well as placed them at odds with “the aesthetic field defined by [Alfredo] Boulton’s teleological paradigm.” Gabriela Rangel, “An Art of Nooks: Notes on Non-Objectual Experiences in Venezuela.” e-misférica (New York: New York University, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics) 8, no. 1 PERFORMANCE ≠ LIFE (Summer 2011): n/p.

7 “…la aplastante superficialidad que limita y caracteriza a la literatura venezolana.” El Techo de la Ballena, Introduction to Homenaje a la cursilería, June 1961, in Rama, Antología, 189.

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Domestic Radicalism

In Homenaje a la cursilería, El Techo played on tensions between popular cultural

objects, an entrenched literary tradition, and the capitalist socioeconomic forces that

threatened to erode the hegemony of Venezuelan elites. At stake was a key midcentury

moment when the upper class began to fear the social ascension of the highly educated

middle class to which most of El Techo members belonged. At the same time, the elites

were in the process of forfeiting those Utopian projections that had been expressed through

massive architectural transformations and the promotion of constructivist tendencies in the

arts. In this context, El Techo’s proposed disruptive return to vernacular behaviors

suggested a twofold critique of the main byproducts of Venezuela’s frenzied capitalism: “a

modernization that [wa]s also ruinous, a progress that [wa]s also regressive.”8

Homenaje a la cursilería specifically brought to life (in the manner that revivals

do) the often downplayed conceits of lo cursi, the naming premise for the exhibition, and the related Venezuelan idiom of lo pavoso (or all that is said to be of such bad taste that it provokes bad luck). In the Spanish language, the term cursi conveys both ostentation and

an excessive sentimentalism (or maudlin) bordering on the ridiculous (schmaltz by some

8 In Europe, the critique of high capitalist culture resulted in what Hal Foster coins the “surrealist marvelous:” the modern mannequin (at once human and nonhuman commodity)—the female counterpart to the male industrial machine (the worker)—, and the Romantic ruin (both historical and natural). Both tropes confuse the animate with the inanimate and, in doing so, confront “the immanence of death in life.” Certainly, as Foster notes, if the mannequin is “the very image of capitalist reification,” the ruin is evocative of the space of the unconscious: “In the ruin cultural progress is captured by natural entropy, and in the mannequin the human figure is given over to the commodity…” Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 157−59. El Techo made frequent allusions to the dyad, see for example: Efraín Hurtado’s “Ruina” and Salvador Garmendia’s “Maniquíes,” both published in the third issue of rayado sobre el techo which, apropos of their regressive concern, featured a ruinous photographic urban landscape on its cover. El Techo de la Ballena, rayado sobre el techo 3, 22 and 46−47 respectively.

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accounts). Yet, in addition to undeniable associations with the tacky, cheap, frumpy,

outmoded, or even sleazy, Luis Camnitzer has suggested that in Latin America lo cursi also encompasses a far more complex cultural dimension as an affective idiom used to overcome gaps stemming from either class difference (at the internal level) or colonialism

(if applied from outside the region).9 Although issued in the context of his analysis of

Cuban kitsch, this understanding is particularly fitting to a Venezuelan context as a

fundamentally classist society with severe lags in the cultural arena. Indeed, Venezuela’s

vast petroleum reserves had allowed the country to quickly import the necessary cultural

goods through which it sought to overcome critical shortcomings resulting from the relative

inconsequence of its colonial past as an outpost of Bogotá and its insignificant pre-

Columbian tradition.

In a country obsessed with propriety, as the pervasiveness of Carreño’s manual

demonstrates, the elite disdain of lo cursi and lo pavoso served as a prerogative for class- based exclusion as well as a strategy for justifying the unevenness of Venezuelan social development. In contrast, El Techo’s recovery of these traits allowed it to simultaneously leverage and challenge cultural and political institutional structures. That is to say, the group’s deployment of the selected objects and documents into an archival structure destabilized the legitimacy of the intellectual production and material fabric of local

sociopolitical elites. It also allowed it to craft a subversive position challenging the

supposed discursive authority of dominant factions. By putting these sources up on the

9 Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 17.

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walls and disassociating them from their originally intended format and meaning, El Techo

issued a counternarrative rooted in familiar aspects of the Venezuelan context.

My argument finds theoretical grounding in the Freudian conception of the

uncanny, the quintessential bourgeois fear of the domestic environment. For Freud, the

uncanny (from the German unheimlich, which loosely translates as “unhomely” or “not

from the house”) is something that is secretly familiar such as the horror of death, ghost

apparitions, madness, and as in this case even the unsophisticated aspects of national

culture. These frightful elements undergo repression and then re-emerge as anxiety.10 In

Homenaje a la cursilería, El Techo orchestrated the compounded strategy of deliberately regressing to the repressed values of lo cursi and lo pavoso, which it then redirected to a critical end. Their strategy mirrored similar détournements by the Situationist International

(SI) whose inversions were also directed at capitalism and its discontents.11 Through the

critique of the spectacle, which took its definitive shape in 1967 when Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle, Situationists recovered well-known artistic

referents in order to expose the instability of advanced forms of capitalism. For Debord,

the spectacle referred to a version of the world objectified through the mass mediated

10 See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey in Collaboration with Anna Freud, vol. XVII (1917−1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 219−52.

11 The Situationists’ inaugural 1958 journal defined détournement as “the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.” Situationist International, “Définitions,” Internationale situationniste (Paris) no. 1 (June 1958): 13.

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barrage of images and commodities. He rationalized that the economic domination of

social life began as an instrument of unification, but in advanced stages of capitalism

degraded into the alienation of workers and consumers from each other and from

themselves. Debord thought that the process would culminate in the preemeinence of

social forces over individual experience.12 Fittingly, the détournements of the Situationists

hinged on the use of images and language (made spectacular through their cooptation by

mass media) to free involuntary spectators from this game of domination. In a similar

fashion, El Techo adopted the characteristic Venezuelan humor and quick wit, often the

butt of high-brow cultural and political discourse, to tout a more accurate remake of official

history. Such accounts were based on the recuperation of vernacular values that had been

undermined by the State in its concerted outward projection of technological modernity

and cultural sophistication. As I argue, the group’s reversal provided the means for an

expeditious protest against the supremacy of a mediocre cultural establishment that had

been promoted as the national paradigm. More broadly, El Techo also paved the way for

protesting the “continued political and economic miscalculations of the Venezuelan democracy” itself.13

12 Debord described the process of degradation as follows: “The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life had brought into the definition of all human realization an obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual ‘having’ must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social, directly dependent on social force, shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only because it is not.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; translation, Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), n/p (aphorism 17).

13 “No como producto del azar, ni como ocio o actividad de un grupo de intelectuales evadidos o presuntamente inadaptados en el actual engranaje social, sino más bien como un gesto de franca protesta ante la permanente e indeclinable farsa cultural del país y el continuado desacierto político y económico que

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A Rhetorical Return to the Kitsch

Most of El Techo’s exhibitions were by the very nature of their pugnacious content often short-lived and ephemeral. As such, limited photographic or critical documentation remains and any analysis of these actions must make amends with the short supply of the material. Thus, the present interrogation of Homenaje a la cursilería is based on a handful of documents and photographs that while revelatory, are also inherently fragmentary. In the manifesto that El Techo handed out during the exhibition’s opening night celebrations

(fig. 4.3), the painter Alberto Brandt, who is said to have authored it, called attention to the need to bring to the fore the excess, bad taste, and flashiness often associated with the

Venezuelan lower classes. This would serve as the grounds for promoting a more honest set of national values:

If with this exhibition—which we already know is flawed because we would have needed to include a large part of our history and of what has been called our RECOGNIZED VALUES in order to complete it—…we succeed in making lo cursi [tacky, even maudlin] an extension of lo pavoso [the unlucky], which in turn implies a cliché, then we’ll have reached the crux of the matter. Although not everything that may jinx you [lo pavoso] is cursi, everything that is cursi does bring bad luck [pava], and so it is essential to make this public (national) knowledge, in order to turn lo cursi into a state of consciousness that has been, unconsciously, a factor that we couldn’t change throughout the history of this country (i.e. MOTHERLAND). In this way and by knowing the rules of the game, maybe the general state of the country will become more malleable and less grotesque. We therefore declare our exhibition to be strictly vernacular, almost folkloric, even ordinary. As a result, we will transform the repeated and timely slogan VENEZUELA FIRST into a very useful motto.14

registra la democracia venezolana, El Techo de la Ballena pone en evidencia la inveterada mediocridad de nuestro ambiente cultural.” Rama, Antología, 189.

14 “Si en esta exposición —que de antemano sabemos deficiente: para completarla nos hubiese sido necesario incluir en ella gran parte de nuestra historia y de lo que se ha dado por llamar nuestros VALORES CONSAGRADOS— hemos logrado confundir esa diferenciación, es decir, que lo cursi se haga una extensión

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In other words, Brandt suggested that the outdated vernacular values of lo cursi and lo pavoso could be used as antidotes for the stubborn habit of obscuring the discrepancies between the actual marginal conditions of most Venezuelans, and the image of national industrial modernization and cultural sophistication disseminated by the state and

sociopolitical elites.

On the political front, the manifesto directly attacked Rómulo Betancourt and his long-time political foe Rafael Caldera (1916−2009), the founder of the right-of-center

Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI), also known as the

Partido Socialcristiano. The text literally condemned “the pipe of Rómulo Bethancourt

[sic] and his doggie and…the buttonholes of Rafael Caldera (A certain Creole smile?)” through irreverent and nonsensical language that recalled Dada.15 Just a few years earlier, in the wake of the 1958 elections, Betancourt and Caldera had been accomplices in signing the “Punto Fijo pact” that effectively initiated a long-lasting bipartite system in which

power alternated between their respective parties.16 For many detractors, the members of

de lo pavoso, rozando muy de paso el lugar común, consideraremos que habremos logrado un objetivo muy primordial, pues, si bien todo lo pavoso no es cursi, todo lo cursi es pavoso y, es honesto, hacerlo del conocimiento público (patrio) es esencial. Convertir a la cursilería en una suerte de razón de estado consciente que —inconscientemente— ha sido factor indeclinable a lo largo de toda la historia de este país (léase: PATRIA). De esta manera, y conociendo los términos a manejar, tal vez la situación general del país se torne más dúctil y menos ridícula. En este sentido declaramos que nuestra exposición es estrictamente vernácula, casi folclórica, por no decir típica. Hacemos, en consecuencia, del reiterado y oportuno lema VENEZUELA PRIMERO una consigna utilísima.” [Alberto Brandt], “[Establecer una frontera entre lo cursi y lo pavoso...]/[Homenaje a la cursilería],” c. May 1961, n/p. Colección Sagrario Berti, Caracas. ICAA Digital Archive no. 1059586. Partially translated by Laura Pérez (with my modifications) as “second catalogue,” in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 258.

15 [Brandt], [Establecer una frontera…], n/p.

16 On October 31, 1958, both politicians joined Jóvito Villalba (1908−89) of the Unión Republicana Democrática (URD) party in ratifying the biding document. Caldera finally got his turn at the presidency on

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El Techo surely among them, such a political maneuver had been an embarrassing farce negotiated privately to the further detriment of the democratic process. Given the unavailability of comprehensive or detailed photographic documentation on Homenaje a

la cursilería, I can only surmise how images such as a 1958 campaign poster for Betancourt

(fig. 4.4) or the actual photograph that records the ratification of the pact (fig. 4.5) may

have reinforced El Techo’s exaltation of the pivotal notions of lo cursi and lo pavoso in

Venezuelan politics.17 Rounding out these political incidences, Brandt’s text declared the quarrels between “serious politicians and ministry footmen”—“PROTOCOLARY ACTS” in their unique group speak—just as cursi as the mindless debates between painters and journalists, or First World writers on tour.18 The manifesto mocked the self- aggrandizement that often became the badge of intellectuals coming from the developed world.

two occasions in 1969 and again from 1994 to 1998, when he was finally defeated by Hugo Chávez in popular elections.

17 The manifesto also calls into question “the purple [smocks] of Cardinal [José Humberto] Quintero” perhaps because of the condescending teleological approach he often took when meddling in national issues. A 1956 speech delivered by the Cardinal at the inauguration of the main building of the Universidad de los Andes in Mérida is indicative of the ornamental language that may have compelled El Techo de la Ballena to include him in the list. On that occasion, he praised Juan Vicente Gómez as having been a staunch protector of the institution and of higher learning: “Recordaréis que en los cuentecillos infantiles, además de hadas y de ogros, figuraban gigantes que a veces protegían a reales señoras en horas de infortunio y, con las potentes fuerzas de que estaban dotados, las reponían en sus antiguos tronos. La voz de la conciencia me tacharía de injusto y de cobarde si, por un sentimiento pusilánime ante posibles críticas, callara a estas alturas de mi crónica que, ya en el presente siglo, la Universidad halló en el último de nuestros Césares democráticos uno de esos gigantes protectores.” José Humberto Quintero, “La Verdad ante Todo,” J. Humberto Quintero, Discursos, Obras Publicadas 1924-1972 (Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1972), 804−05.

18 “Hay cursilerías inevitables [como] las polémicas entre pintores y periodistas [y] las polémicas entre políticos serios y lacayos de cancillería : TODO ACTO DE PROTOCOLO ES CURSI ¿NO? Las visitas de grandes escritores a pa[í]ses subdesarrollados, aunque el escritor venga de paso en misión… ¡cursi! LO CURSI ES CURSI Y ES ASI[.]” [Brandt], [Establecer una frontera...], n/p.

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Through Homenaje a la cursilería, El Techo condemned the nostalgic

enthronement of certain national symbols in culture and aestheticism. For example, the

manifesto identified Mount Ávila as the culprit of Venezuelan kitsch. It proclaimed the

forested mountain culpable of “ALL of Manuel Cabré’s work” and “of certain symbols by

Pedro Centeno Vallenilla” while in another section it stated: “Flowers are for looking at,

but what if they are painted by [Luis Alfredo] López Mendes [sic]?!!!”19 All three were

painters of undeniable merit, however their figuración blandengue [mawkish figuration],

quoting Edmundo Aray, was certainly not in concert with El Techo’s antagonistic stance.20

The Spanish-born Manuel Cabré (1890−1984) made a career out of Mount Ávila, invoking it as the main subject of his prolific oeuvre (fig. 4.6). Pedro Centeno Vallenilla’s

(1904−88) nudes often celebrated Venezuela’s heroic past and mythological origins (fig.

4.7). Luis Alfredo López Méndez (1901−96) was best known for floral still-lifes and quaint genre scenes (fig. 4.8). Talented as they were, they were certainly not aligned with the call to action at the end of El Techo’s manifesto: “WE MUST BURN MOUNT

ÁVILA.”21

19 “El Ávila es culpable: …de TODA la pintura de Manuel Cabré….de ciertos símbolos de Pedo Centeno Vallenilla.” “Las flores son para mirarlas, pero ¿cuándo las pinta López Mendes?!!!” [Brandt], [Establecer una frontera...], n/p.

20 Aray defined figuración blandengue as follows: “el plácido ambiente de la llamada cultura nacional, el arte para la posteridad con su fardo de tradiciones y buen gusto, el arte como escalón o, plataforma para el reconocimiento de la sociedad culta. …los soporiferos de la escolástica literaria y del positivismo y el modernismo trasnochado. Las postales del Ávila y las postales de jarrón.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 130. In 1950, Carlos González Bogen of Los Disidentes had referred to this brand of work with mass appeal among the Venezuelan upper middle class as “bastard Impressionism.” See Chapter 1, note 47.

21 “HAY QUE QUEMAR EL AVILA.” [Brandt], [Establecer una frontera...], n/p. Aray recalled López Méndez’s reaction against the backlash he received from El Techo on more than one occasion: “Un día me llama López Méndez y me dice: ¿Usted es el señor Edmundo Aray? El mismo —le respondo—. Entonces me dice: Yo quisiera conversar con usted y con Juan Calzadilla y, si es posible, con Perán Erminy.

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Kitsch at the Gallery

Brandt’s textural evocation of kitsch populism and extreme sentimentality directly linked the manifesto to the exhibition. The document included a roster of “fatally schmaltzy” cases in the national political arena (Betancourt’s pipe or Caldera’s smile), commonplace bourgeois behaviors (“[charitable] té-canastas and café-bridges benefiting poor children” among them), as well as the nostalgic and superficial work of a cadre of recognized local artists and authors (including Cabré and Centeno Vallenilla).22 In clear dialogue with one another, these overarching themes resonated in the exhibition’s collaged constructions. An excerpt from one of the books that El Techo included in Homenaje a la cursilería provides a clear example of the reciprocity between the printed manifesto and the exhibition itself. The celebrated journalist and museum director Sofía Ímber [de]

Meneses (b. 1924), who reviewed the event for the newsprint magazine Páginas, was particularly struck by Amor y pureza [Love and Naïveté], a sort of moral guidebook for proper (and politically correct) Catholic youth written by an unidentified priest that had been included on the display. From this “absurd hodgepodge of stupidity and slobbery,”

Ímber wrote of the volume, El Techo recovered the following affirmation:

Le digo: De acuerdo. Total que nos citó en un bar... Sin mayores preámbulos nos dice, enormemente angustiado, yo quiero conversar con ustedes por que el señor Calzadilla ha atacado a mi pintura. Quiero confesarles que yo vivo de ella; si ustedes siguen atacando mi pintura voy a perder mis clientes, mis compradores, a la gente que gusta de mi trabajo. Yo sé que mi pintura no tiene nada que ver con ustedes y que pueden llamarla como quieran en sus declaraciones, pero les ruego que procuren no mencionarme porque yo vivo de ella. La pintura es mi oficio, mi modo de vivir. Claro que se alargó la noche. Consumimos tragos y anécdotas. El compromiso fue cumplido como correspondía. Nunca más.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 129.

22 [Brandt], [Establecer una frontera…], n/p.

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Love is an alloy between beings of the same nature: flower with flower, animal with animal, human animal with human animal, divine…man with divine man. Only afterwards do we reach Christian love, which has its own moniker [:] …charity.23

The book’s affront on pious love and the sacramental sanctity of marriage carried over to the gallery space. It is possible in a faded photograph included in Imber’s critique to discern how El Techo exposed its interpretations of some of the attitudes that Amor y pureza addressed in print below the “Venezuela Primero” [Venezuela First] slogan along the back wall of the exhibition (fig. 4.9). The artists constructed over a dark cardboard background towards the back corner of the gallery a vitriolic bricolage complete with a heart-shaped cutout and a white rose, traditionally recognized as a symbol of consummate achievement and perfection.24 The granulated photographic source available for analysis

does not allow for a reading of what I am sure would have been revelatory content.

However, the image confirms that the collage included several newspaper clippings

(perhaps praising the virtues of love) as well as a photograph of the momentous occasion when a groom led his new bride down the church aisle.

A collage along another wall confronted the country’s changing gender roles and rules of civic engagement (fig. 4.10). The symbolic tension between the inverted hand fan on the upper extreme of the wall and the cutout of the female bodybuilder on the central

23 On Amor y pureza, Ímber wrote: “[es un libro de orientación moral y sentimental para uso de adolescentes cristianos [escrito por un sacerdote. Es] la más absurda mezcolanza de zoquetadas y sensiblerías. [Ahí El Techo encontró la siguiente] ‘peregrina afirmación’: ‘El amor es la aleación entre seres de la misma naturaleza: flor con flor, animal con animal, hombre animal con hombre animal, hombre (cómo diremos?) divino, con hombre divino. Solamente después llegamos al amor cristiano, al que, con su término propio, se denomina caridad.” [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena,” 17.

24 Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 275.

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plane served as a critical window to El Techo’s views on femininity. The dark fan was

fully opened to expose its floral embellishment. The motif represented a vestige of the

cultural dynamics of a pre-modern period, when devoid of agency women used it in order

to develop an unstable system of codes relating to flirtation and courting rituals. The fan, which oscilated between its role as an instrument of female coquetry and its disquieting capacity to convey a woman’s will in matters of sexuality, was nonetheless an undeniable schmaltzy reminder of the country’s colonial past. Due to its delicate beauty, it contrasted

with the sheer physical force and determination of the Venus with biceps who El Techo superimposed over several press clippings. This woman was a far cry from such widespread idealized renditions of beauty as the curvaceous and overheated fan-clad señorita on the April 18, 1961 cover of the satirical magazine El Gallo Pelón (fig. 4.11) or from real-life exemplars such as the nineteen-year-old beauty queen Ana Griselda Vegas

Albornoz (b. 1941) who—in her role as Miss Venezuela 1961—emblematized the

invariable prerogative of national grace and yet another projection of Venezuelan

“perfection” (fig. 4.12).

The artists placed the contemporaneous Cartilla Cívica Popular on the right side

of this construction (fig. 4.13). It was issued in the early sixties during a watershed moment

of political transition when the country went from a military dictatorship to a democratic

society. The poster-sized Cartilla outlined the rights and responsibilities of a newly

engaged democratic citizenship. It was designed at the UCV and edited by the Dirección

de Cultura y Bellas Artes in collaboration with the Oficina de Educación de Adultos y

Cultura Popular, both under the aegis of the Ministry of Education. The poster addressed

issues of varying importance including the inscription of children at the civil registry, the

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role of vaccination in the fight against disease, the undeniable right to healthcare, respect for the individual as well as for the Armed Forces, the Judicial Branch and the Constitution, and the disavowal of de facto impositions as a legitimate form of government. This last point was encapsulated by the slogan: “Civic discipline against dictatorships!”25 The document was part of a genre of political and civic pedagogies that proliferated in Spain and Latin America during the twentieth century, of which Carreño’s Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras was a prime example.26 It also reflected an awareness of the countless posters on similar subject matter (figs. 4.14 a-c) that were produced in Puerto Rico since the mid-forties under Luis Muñoz Marín (1898−1980), a trusted advisor to Rómulo

Betancourt and the island’s first democratically‐elected governor (in office, 1949−65).27

25 The Cartilla cívica popular reads: “¡Contra las dictaduras, disciplina cívica!”

26 The comic book layout and poster format of the Venezuelan Cartilla Cívica Popular differentiated it from the austerity of most of its European and Latin American counterparts with the exception, perhaps, of a Spanish Cartilla Moderna de Urbanidad (1928), which took advantage of a similar format in summarizing the key objectives of its several lessons. Beyond Carreño’s work, see among many examples: D. Federico Bosch y Serra, Prontuario de urbanidad. Compuesto exprofeso para los alumnos de las escuelas de primera enseñanza (1903; reprint, Barcelona: Papelería e Imprenta de VIUDA de J. Rosals, 1925); José Martínez Aguiló, Nociones de Urbanidad y Deberes Religiosos y Sociales (Barcelona: López Robert, 1906); Pilar Pascual de Sanjuán, Breve Tratado de Urbanidad para las Niñas (Barcelona: Hijos de Paluzíe, 1919); Ignacio Sánchez Santamaría, Cartilla cívica o catecismo del ciudadano. Para uso de las escuelas y colegios en Colombia (Bogotá: Sociedad Editorial, 1926); F.T.D., Cartilla moderna de urbanidad (Barcelona: Editorial F.T.D., 1928); Pascual de Sanjuan, Nociones de urbanidad para las niñas (Barcelona: Imprenta Elzeviriana y Librería Camí, S.A., 1934); Victoriano F. Ascarza, Lecturas ciudadanas (educación cívica) (Madrid: El Magisterio Español, c. 1930s); Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, Cartilla cívica para el pueblo dominicano, [1932] (Ciudad Trujillo [Santo Domingo]: Secretaría de Estado de Educación y Bellas Artes, 1951); Sara de Méndez Montenegro, Cartilla cívica elemental del guatemalteco (Guatemala City: Editorial ‘José de Pineda Ibarra,’ 1968); and more recently, Anon., Cartilla cívica libre al viento (Guatemala City: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1991); Ángel Chinchilla, org., Cartilla cívica de El Salvador. Saludemos la patria orgullosos (Guatemala City: Editorial Piedra Santa, c. 1992).

27 As a longtime friend of Muñoz Marín, Betancourt may have become familiar with the ideological pedagogy of the División de Educación a la Comunidad [Division of Community Education] (DIVEDCO) (1949−91) during his exile in Puerto Rico (1954−57). Departing from Rooseveltian New Deal social welfare programs, the DIVEDCO fermented the political and civic engagement of disenfranchised populations through films, profusely illustrated booklets, and posters. It emerged from two earlier collaborative experiments during the governorship of Rexford G. Tugwell (1891−79, in office 1945−46) when Muñoz Marín was president of the insular Senate: the Photo File at the Governor’s Office of Information (1945−46)

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Homenaje a la cursilería also exposed the fallacies of the foundational rhetoric of the Venezuelan democratic state following the self-proclaimed October Revolution of 1945 through which Betancourt first took control of the country as provisional president.28 For example, the inclusion of the phrase “Venezuela Primero” (in capital letters) in both the manifesto and exhibition directly alluded to the Trienio Adeco, the three years between

1945 and 1948 when leftist factions within the popular-base of Acción Democrátrica pushed forth a much needed (but paradoxical) program for economic nationalism stressing alignment with international oil and gas corporations. Slogans that also included “La

Revolución Democrática y Antiimperialista” and “Por una Venezuela Libre y de los

Venezolanos” were fundamental to such a political imperative demanding equitable shares in the exploitation of the subsoil. In hindsight, their widespread use revealed the absurdity of the supposedly new dynamics between the (popular) State and foreign capital by means of which, it was thought, the country would “safeguard…our national patrimony,” as

Betancourt justified it.29

and the Division of Film and Graphics within the island’s Commission of Parks and Recreation (1946−49). Along with the DIVEDCO, these programs established the infrastructure for a vigorous national art movement in the island beginning in the fifties. In the spirit of the Venezuelan Cartilla Cívica Popular, Muñoz Marín stated of the former that it broadened and strengthened the “educational roots of democracy in the daily living practices of our urban and rural people.” Muñoz Marín in “Community Change: An Action Program in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 9, no. 2 (1953), 9. See also, María C. Gaztambide, “Exporting the New Deal to the Tropics?: The Legacy of Roosevelt-era Art Programs in Puerto Rico,” unpublished, read at “Encuentros: Artistic Exchange between the U.S. and Latin America,” a symposium at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, October 5−6, 2011.

28 On October 18, 1945, Acción Democrática and factions within the armed forces coordinated the taking of a number of strategic military installations in Caracas and in the city of Maracay. The coup d’état culminated in the surrender of Isaías Medina Angarita on October 19, the same day that a military Junta led by Betancourt took control of Miraflores Palace in Caracas. See also Chapter 1, note 74.

29 Proponents of this plan included Domingo Alberto Rangel, Luis Lander, P.B. Pérez Salinas, Ruiz Pineda, Alberto Carnevali, and R. Quijada. See: Mitos políticos en las sociedades andinas: orígenes,

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By 1961 when El Techo opened Homenaje a la cursilería to public view, it had

become more than apparent that President Betancourt’s political ambitions had never been

to nationalize the oil industry but, rather, to negotiate a fifty-fifty share of the profits

generated by foreign corporations in Venezuela.30 The irony of political discourse

conflating economic nationalism and a democratic imaginary was not lost on El Techo.

Rather than plastering the walls of the gallery with iconography evoking the heroics of the

national oil and gas industry, the collective isolated the slogan “Venezuela Primero” by

completely negating its original context (see fig. 4.9). Below it, the group situated the

previously mentioned communiqué on chaste love. And, above it the group placed folklore:

the costume, accoutrements, and musical instruments of the Venezuelan llaneros (figs. 4.15

a-b), the plainsmen of the Western region along the Colombian border. Llaneros, like the

North American cowboys or the gauchos of the River Plate, were frequent stand-ins for the

politicized national body.31 El Techo conveyed the llaneros’ legacy of agency through the

main instruments (the arpa llanera [a diatonic harp], the small four-string cuatro guitar,

and the maracas) of their principal musical genre, the joropo.32 El Techo’s direct allusion

invenciones y ficciones, ed. Germán Carrera Damas, Carole Leal Curiel, Georges Lomné, and Frédéric Martínez (Baruta, Venezuela: Editorial Equinoccio, 2006), 143−46.

30 Ibid.

31 In Venezuela, the nationalist image of the llanero has an added political dimension as a result of the Battle of Las Queseras del Medio (April 2, 1819) during the Venezuelan War of Independence (1811−23). On that occasion, a band of marauding llaneros led by José Antonio Páez (1790–1873) fought alongside Simón Bolivar’s troops in defeat of the Spanish army. At a critical moment in the battle, Páez commanded his llaneros to turn around—issuing the phrase ¡Vuelvan Caras!—in order to attack the Spanish cavalry that was pursuing them. His decree startled the Spaniards and left a trail of casualties in the wake. Arturo Michelena’s (1863–98) realist 1890 painting Vuelvan Caras [Turn around] illustrates this historic battle.

32 So strong is this connection between the joropo and the national imaginary, that “Alma Llanera” (c. 1914) by composer Elías Gutiérrez (1870–1954) and lyricist Rafael Bolívar Coronado (1884−1924), the

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to a llanero tradition confronted the bourgeois obsession with obscuring Venezuela’s agricultural past through the predictable guise of technological progress. Indeed, the collective’s gesture served as an uncomfortable reminder to many urban elites of their own roots in the agricultural backlands of Venezuela.33

An Aesthetic of Accumulation

IInformalism provided El Techo with an initial aesthetic language through which it could denounce a powerful social and economic force that was imposing a modernizing project that fell short of the Utopian dream of widespread prosperity. Yet together with the other indivisible elements of their unique Gesamtkunstwerk (texts and publications, artworks, the corrosive themes of their exhibitions, performative actions), the co-optation of the ready-made ensured the continued efficacy of their discourse. The strategy allowed the collective to integrate actual materials stemming from the very aspects of Venezuelan culture that gave shape to their proposals. However, in artistic terms, El Techo’s understanding of the objet trouvé went far beyond the Duchampian penchant for appropriating unaltered industrially manufactured objects to convey aesthetic ideas.

Instead, the group placed on equal footing their critique of capitalist modes of production and a failing political project in Venezuela with all purely aesthetic concerns. Such a

most famous of joropos, is often considered Venezuela’s unofficial national anthem. For more on the emergence and of the widespread genre as a nationalistic symbol (linked to a related dance and social event) in Venezuela during in the 1920 to 1960 period, see: Pedro Rafael Aponte, “The Invention of the National in Venezuelan Art Music, 1920−1960” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburg, 2008), 166–77.

33 El Techo’s politicized identification with an agrarian peasant stock mirrored the earlier Argentinean adoption of the gaucho as the emblem for an avant-garde project associated with the Buenos Aires journal Martín Fierro in the twenties.

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fundamental imperative thus required the collective to gather together (as key elements in

its amalgamated production) circumstances, events, processes, and materials that had been

overlooked by Dadaists decades before. Inasmuch as the central premise of Homenaje a

la cursilería was to co-opt the cursi and the pavoso, specifically, the strategy placed them

in extremely close proximity to the operative détournements that the Situationists had

executed during the early years of their initial artistic phase (from its beginnings in 1957

until about 1962 when it turned to political criticism). Artists such as Asger Jorn

(Denmark, 1914−73) and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio (Italy, 1902−64) pioneered large-scale

paintings that were prepared en masse and often manufactured through the aid of industrial

machinery and paint.34 Recalling the axiological intent of such works, which tarnished

their original economic and symbolic value, here El Techo turned texts and emblems of

Venezuelan personality (such as lo cursi and lo pavoso) against the nation’s struggling

capitalist system and its print media culture.35

Given such prerogatives, perhaps El Techo’s multi-media assemblages may best be

described as situational ready-mades. Their “intervened” additions and collages of the

everyday certainly brought the group closer to a much broader international avant-garde

that, at that very moment, struggled with ideological focusing. Along with the wide

34 On April 12, 1958, the group carried out its most famous art intervention, a raid on an art critic gathering in Brussels that entailed the wide circulation of a situationist proclamation. The text asked, among other things, that the participating critics “Disperse, fragments of art critics, critics of fragments of art. The Situationist International is now organizing the integral artistic activity of the future. You have nothing more to say.” The action received significant media coverage and culminated in the arrest of various situationists and sympathizers associated with the scandal. See: “Action en Belgique contre l’assemblée des critiques d’art internationaux,” Internationale Situationniste (Paris) no. 1 (June 1958). This translation is from Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006).

35 El Techo’s strategy foretold its later adaptation of techniques from advertising and graphic design to issue similar critiques against the massification of culture (see Chapter 3).

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spectrum of their sources, the group’s penchant for vernacular absurdities anticipated a

pivotal notion that Guy Debord later teased out as the central paradigm of Situationist

theory in 1967: spectacle as a perpetually growing and undistinguishable mass of

undifferentiated image-objects and the commodification of its experience promulgated through mass media.36 El Techo’s critique of a hypocritical Venezuelan political and art

establishment intuitively sought to intercept this numbing and detracting force through

piercing observations and the reestablishment of critical connections to national essentials,

duly understood by the group as lo cursi and lo pavoso.

Vernacular Happening

The critique of Situationist spectacle through the notion of spectacle was germane

to Homenaje a la cursilería from its inception. A rare extant photograph recorded the

moment when a hooded Rodolfo Izaguirre took to the streets of El Conde to promote the

exhibition (fig. 4.16). Flanked by Edmundo Aray and Carlos Contramaestre to the right,

Izaguirre embodies something between a lay street hawker and an atoning encapuchado in

a Holy Week procession. The resulting contradiction—a penitent man peddling an

antithetical radical truth—destabilized meaning and embodied the convex praxis that in

1967 Dámaso Ogaz rationalized as the mot-valise of lo majamámico.37 The somewhat

36 The central node of the Situationist critique focused on mass media as capitalism’s most glaring superficial manifestation and how it had turned consumers and workers into passive subjects whose sole concerns revolved around the acquisition of commodities. See: Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

37 See Chapter 3, “Release,” 118−24.

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blasphemous image, moreover, reminds us of the degree to which the balleneros took to

heart their key imperative to change life and transform society.

On the night of the inauguration, the attending public was asked to walk through

spaces covered in images and literary works as El Techo members read randomly selected

passages from the material on display. It is impossible to identify the specific literature on

the walls during Homenaje a la cursilería, but the manifesto provided clues, as when it questioned whether “the thinking of Cecilio Acosta [and] the complete works of Andrés

Bello” could better be described as “a schmaltzy Athenaeum.”38 In 1826 with his country

recently freed from Spanish domination, Bello (1781−1865) wrote “Silva a la Agricultura de la Zona Tórrida” [Agriculture of the Torrid Zone] from London:

Oh, youngest of the nations, lift your brow Crowned with new laurels in the marveling West! Give honor to the fields, the simple life endow, And hold the plains and modest farmer blest! So that among you evermore shall reign Fair Liberty as a shelter, A tight rein to ambition, a shrine for Law Thy people’s paths immortal there to find Not fickle nor in vain!– So emulous Time shall see disclosed New generations and new names of might, Blazing in highest light Beside your heroes old!39

38 “Los pensamientos de Cecilio acosta [sic], las obras completas de Andrés Bello. ¿ES UN ATENEO CURSI?” [Brandt], [Establecer una frontera...], n/p.

39 From the original: “¡Oh jóvenes naciones, que ceñida/alzáis sobre el atónito occidente/de tempranos laureles la cabeza!/Honrad el campo, honrad la simple vida/del labrador, y su frugal llaneza./Así tendrán en vos perpetuamente/la libertad morada,/y freno la ambición, y la ley templo./Las gentes a la senda/de la inmortalidad, ardua y fragosa,/animarán, citando vuestro ejemplo.” Andrés Bello, “Silva a la Agricultura de la Zona Tórrida,” in Bello and Pedro Grases, Repertorio Americano I (London: Bossage, Barthés I Lowell, 1826), 7−18; translation (with slight modifications) from Hispanic Anthology Collected and Arranged by Thomas Walsh. Ed. Thomas Walsh (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1920), 390−94.

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Did El Techo read these very verses by the national paterfamilias and onetime advisor to

Simón Bolívar (1783−1830) during the opening? We will never now. However, the bucolic language of Bello’s pastoral ode to the scorching Torrid Zone certainly clashed perfectly with the irreverence of Brandt and the balleneros as they passed around platters

of “edible art” during opening night!

If “Silva a la Agricultura de la Zona Tórrida” addressed an unquestionably local

context, in its familiar, yet florid, identification of the llanero lifestyle and pastoral

surroundings as autonomic loci, Homenaje a la cursilería’s installation had roots in the

vernacular. However here it was applied towards vastly different ends. Rather than

eliciting patriotism and national pride, as Bello’s ode would have during the nineteenth

century, El Techo invoked the vernacular in order to outrage Venezuelan elites. The

tabletop assemblage at El Conde that offered the catalogue for sale for one bolivar (fig.

4.17) provides a compelling example. At first glance, it recalled similar displays of

literature during the 1938 Parisian Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (fig. 4.18).

Nevertheless, the Caracas tableau was dressed with a fine embroidered tablecloth, a local

handicraft inescapable in many bourgeois homes, atop which El Techo placed a mantle

clock, a small chest with flower embellishments, local bric-à-brac, and, on the back, a

stack of reading materials. This chaotic amalgamation of objects not only contrasted with

the Parisian example, but also collided with the sparse sophistication of contemporaneous

avant-garde interiors in Venezuela. These included Giὸ Ponti’s Villa Planchart (see fig.

1.12b) and Alfredo Boulton’s colonial house at Pampatar, Margarita Island with furniture

Venezuelan sophistiqués, El Techo hung nets from the ceiling of its gallery in order to

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evoke a literal connection to fishing and whaling (fig. 4.20), a resource that they had used

once before during Para la restitución del magma.40 The strategy revealed an awareness

of Duchamp’s complicated installation of twine during the First Papers of Surrealism

exhibition held at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan in 1942 (fig. 4.21).

But, more importantly, it also highlighted an insistence on remaining firmly rooted in the

kitsch aspects of the group’s tropical context. In light of Venezuelan tastes in interior

design, the domesticity invoked by El Techo was a parallel one based on consumption,

accumulation, and excess. In other words, the sense of overwrought and haphazard

accumulation of photographic and textual materials mirrored the exaggerated taste of

Venezuelan popular classes.

A clear referent for El Techo’s accumulative aesthetic, which bordered on archival

compulsion, can be found in the exhibition This is Tomorrow held at London’s

Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956 (figs. 4.22 a-b). The show had been organized by the

Independent Group, a loose multidisciplinary collective of artists, writers, and architects

that congregated at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) to address postwar

popular culture.41 This is Tomorrow centered around twelve collaborative multimedia

pieces that, in the spirit of El Techo’s text-heavy 1962 exhibition, deployed found images and other materials from the day-to-day in unleashing a critique of contemporaneity. The

40 Writing as Esteban Muro, Juan Calzadilla described the scene during Para la restitución del magma: “En las paredes, guindados: redes de cazar galápagos, retículas, membranas, pituitarias y cuadros erógenos unisexuados...” Muro [Calzadilla], “Cierta ballena,” n/p. See also chapter 2, note 54.

41 Their critiques often focused on the dichotomies between European and the faster-paced postwar popular culture of the United States. Members included Teyner Banham, Lawrence Alloway, John McHale, Alison and Peter Smithson, Richard Hamilton, William Turnbull, Eduardo Paolozzi, Reyner Banham, Frank Cordell, Toni del Renzio and others.

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Independent Group used the pages of science-fiction magazines, facsimiles of Jackson

Pollock’s paintings, Hollywood film posters, photographs of the streets of London and

modernist architecture, among other sources. Their amalgamations, pin- or tack-board

aesthetics by some accounts, and range of materials resulted in a radical new approach that

anticipated Pop art’s methods for working with visual culture. A cursory look at the

photomechanical collages of John McHale (1922−78) and Daniel González, moreover,

reveals how affinities between both groups were also evident at the level of individual

production. Works such as McHale’s Machine-Made America II (1956) (fig. 4.23) and

González’s untitled collage from his show at 40 Grados a la Sombra (Maracaibo, 1964)

(fig. 4.24) were procedurally similar. Perhaps more importantly, however, they played on

those same tensions between (market) excesses/(industrial) waste and the (personal)

alienation inherent to the capitalist worldview. That is, in their incorporation of similar

sorts of discarded technological detritus and machinery, they underscored a common

contempt for the vexing degradation of the modern worker into a useless machine.

Along with Para la restitución del magma and Homenaje a la necrofilia (October

1962), Homenaje a la cursilería constituted a direct attack on the provincial mentality that continued to characterize the Venezuelan cultural mainstream in the sixties. Indeed, the group’s performative mockery left no political parties or cultural institutions unscathed.

Apropos of the exhibition, Sofía Ímber wrote in solidarity with El Techo of how their El

Conde garage was too small to contain “all of the cursilería produced in our country.”

However, “with their goodwill,” she stated, El Techo managed to exceed the physical limits

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of those four walls with “a big chunk of all of that can and should be called cursi.”42 As

Ímber suggested through deliberate sarcasm, the exhibition was a slap in the face to those that Caupolicán Ovalles had, at times, referred to as “impostors disguised as committed culture makers.”43 Certainly, through their irreverent take on the frightfully familiar and

their destabilization of the notion of spectacle, El Techo de la Ballena assaulted a

Venezuelan “past-that-never-was” to project, if fleetingly, the more honest parameters of a desired “future-that-could-be.”44

42 “Claro está que el garage que han alquilado en El Conde para sus reuniones es muy pequeña [sic] para que en el quepa toda la cursilería producida en nuestro país…pero [con su] buena voluntad […] han logrado meter entre las cuatro paredes de su sede un buen trozo de todo eso que puede y debe llamarse cursi.” [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo,” 17.

43 See Rama, Antología, 121.

44 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 211.

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CHAPTER 5 – DEAD MATTER FOR AN ENLIVENED PRACTICE1

Los balleneros no podíamos desprendernos de nuestra existencia social, respirábamos una atmósfera de muerte, de violencia brutal. Dentro de esa atmosfera de muerte, dentro de esta violencia implacable, realmente nos sentíamos perseguidos, o provocábamos la persecución, consciente o inconscientemente.

—Edmundo Aray, 19992

Late in October of 1962, Carlos Contramaestre, the ballenero who practiced medicine in the remote village of Jajó (State of Trujillo), arrived in Caracas with a truck full of new assemblages created from disintegrating cattle carcasses, viscera, and blood.

He had carefully collected the materials in the slaughterhouse at Cabimas in the nearby

State of Zulia. These radical pieces heralded a fundamental turning point in

Contramaestre’s conception of art. As Edmundo Aray later stated, “Carlos came from

Informalism, from Archimboldo’s gut.”3 It is fitting, then, that in his early production he experimented with organic elements such as earth and ashes. Indeed, at first glance, these

1 The title for this chapter is an adaptation of the headline for an editorial published in November of 1962 in the Caracas based La esfera de la cultura in critique of Homenaje a la necrofilia. It reads: “Escándalo artístico del año: Materias muertas para una pintura viva,” La esfera de la cultura (Caracas) (November 29, 1962).

2 Edmundo Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 132.

3 Ibid.

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works visually resembled informalist canvases. Yet their overt scatological (and

eschatological) theme required the artist to do away with traditional pastels, oils, and

charcoals in favor of materials linked to the physical remains of death. His tools, too,

underwent a similar transformation as the brushes and pencils of his informalist beginnings gave way to bare hands, axes, cleavers, and butcher knives. Contramaestre gave the

resulting series of ephemeral “artworks” (twelve canvases and a sculpture) titles that

related to necrophilia and other abject sexual practices: Erección ante un entierro [Erection

prior to a burial], El Vampiro de Dusseldorf posa junto a una de sus víctimas llamada Inge

[The vampire of Dusseldorf poses with one of his victims named Inge], Beso Negro [Black

kiss], and Ventajas e inconvenientes del condón [Advantages and inconveniences of the

condom], among them. Fittingly, El Techo de la Ballena introduced them to Caracas’

audiences through the watershed exhibition Homenaje a la necrofilia, which opened on

November 2, 1962 at one of its several pop-up galleries from the early sixties.

Building upon the critical work of Juan Calzadilla and more recent scholarship by

Gabriela Rangel and Juan Carlos Palenzuela, I argue that Homenaje a la necrofilia’s all-

encompassing dimension (the works along with the environment and the catalogue for the

exhibition) brought the concept-based trajectory that El Techo initiated with Homenaje a

la cursilería to its logical extreme.4 Whereas the provocative premise behind the 1961

4 In earlier critical appraisals of the period, Calzadilla, Rangel, and Palenzuela qualify Homenaje a la necrofilia as the first conceptual experience in Venezuela. More recently, Rangel locates the kernel of non- objectual art and conceptual forms in the previous year’s Homenaje a la cursilería. The Venezuelan poet and literary critic Alfredo Chacón and Juan Antonio Vasco, the Argentinean poet who was based in Caracas during the sixties, have also underscored the precursory nature of Homenaje a la necrofilia’s provocation. See: Calzadilla, “Los tiempos heroicos. Génesis del arte contemporáneo en Venezuela en el marco del nacimiento de una Sala,” in Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Aixa Sánchez, eds., Sala Mendoza 1956-2001. 45 años de historia del arte contemporáneo en Venezuela (Caracas: Sala Mendoza, 2002), 23−43, 37; Rangel, El

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exhibition was the recovery of two key national values, in Homenaje a la necrofilia the

group activated the equally repressed but far more controversial drives of sex and death.

The impetus for Contramaestre’s innovative works, indeed for the exhibition at large, was

the use of dead matter to give art new meaning. He explained that the confrontation of

death and decomposition with forceful vivid assertions of physical love represented the

group’s will to localize what it viewed as a broader “environmental situation” of worldwide

decay.5 The artist and his ballenero colleagues also understood that the death drive allowed

them to challenge Venezuela’s atmosphere of repression, torture, disappearances, and its

corrosive culture of cyclical violence. On the cultural front, it enabled them to defy an

entrenched set of values that manifested itself in the restrictive unanimity of such

hegemonic tendencies as geometric-abstraction or the (far less popular) strains of folkloric

landscapes and genre scenes. At the same time, the shocking conflation of sex and death

gave shape to an innovative theoretical apparatus proposing that art could be re-

materialized through the creative enterprise itself.6 By enjoining corporeal putrefaction and physical dissolution with a vital sexual force, the group developed an anti-aesthetic of

Techo de la Ballena. Cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad. De la pintura moderna a la instalación (November 11−12, 1998; published, Caracas: Espacio Unión, 1999), 21; Palenzuela, Arte en Venezuela, 1959–1979: De El Techo de la Ballena a 11 Tipos (Caracas: Banco Mercantil, 2005), 283; Rangel, “An Art of Nooks,” n/p. On the shock value of Necrofilia, see, by Chacón: La izquierda cultural venezolana, 1958– 1968: Ensayo y antología (Caracas: Editorial Domingo Fuentes, 1970), 43; as well as Juan Antonio Vasco, “Introducción al Techo de la Ballena,” [Buenos Aires, 1971], in Calzadilla, Ortega Oropeza, González, El Techo de la Ballena, 335−54, 347−48.

5 Contamaestre later recalled in an interview: “La situación de aquel momento estaba muy teñida de muerte, no sólo en Venezuela. Yo recuerdo un titular de la época que se refería a un gran olor nauseabundo en el mundo, a un ambiente cargado de necrofilia. Nosotros lo que hicimos fue transcribir una situación ambiental, no había nada que inventar y ese fue el objetivo de la ‘Necrofilia’.” Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 143−44.

6 See Introduction, note 22 for more on this more appropriate alternative to the notion of dematerialization.

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intentional bad taste—similar to what Nietzsche called “art of the ugly soul” in its opposition to the ideals of beauty—which effected radical systemic transformations

through its provocative nature.7

The Redemption of Dead Matter

Juan Antonio Vasco (1924−84)—the Argentinean poet who gravitated to El Techo

between 1958 to 1968 when he was in Caracas—wrote of how the group reached a pivotal

moment of extreme radicalism in the wake of controversies stemming from the publication

of ¿Duerme usted señor Presidente? With Homenaje a la necrofilia, Vasco continued, their informalist aesthetics definitively gave way to an aggressively militant ethical stance:

“La Ballena had reached the conclusion that Western culture was rotten and that art should not operate as a complicit deodorant, as a floral eau de cologne.” Rather, Vasco rationalized, “art [must] intentionally and ostensibly rot in plain sight, [in order to expose] all that is rotten.”8

The exhibition was neither the first nor the last instance when El Techo extolled

death or even putrefaction to call attention to the many levels of Venezuela’s corrupted

system. Juan Calzadilla’s “Esperando salvación” [Awaiting salvation], a section from

7 In 1876, at the onset of the syphilis that ultimately lead to his insanity, the philosopher wrote about the evocative potential of what he called “Art of the ugly soul”: “One imposes far too narrow limitations on art,” he writes on aphorism 152 of Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirit, “when one demands that only well-ordered, morally balanced souls may express themselves in it. As in the plastic arts, so in music and poetry there is an art of the ugly soul besides the art of the beautiful soul; and the mightiest effects of art, that which tames souls, moves stones and humanizes the beast, have perhaps been mostly achieved precisely by that art.” See: F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1878; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), aphorism 152.

8 Vasco, “Introducción al Techo de la Ballena,” 347.

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Dictado por la jauría, provides a telling example. Published on October 1962, just weeks

before the opening of Homenaje a la necrofilia, death imagery was pivotal to this poetic

condemnation of the pointlessness of bureaucracy and its detrimental effects:

Zeroes pierce the walls of the conscientious skulls that lodge through the eyes of civil servants tormented by the compulsion to count who silently suffer from their myopias with their new suits as they unmercifully dream in shared cages

…

Our society of excluded souls has generated an incredible surplus of inconsequential people civil servants [who] don’t know what to do with their skeletons writhed as old iron underneath torrents of paper their skeletons await salvation their skeletons becoming too big for a place where they no longer fit not sure of what to do with their unchecked thirst for profit and jealousy or what to do with the size of all their misfortunes their corpses disproportionately large where all the deceased can fit9

As its piercing language demonstrates, “Esperando salvación” directly accused those

submissive government and cultural workers whose comfortable official positions

prevented them from apprehending how the system curtailed their own spirit. Equally

9 “Los números ceros atraviesan las paredes/de los cráneos limpios de conciencia se internan/por el ojo de los funcionarios a quienes atormenta la manía de contar/que padecer en silencio sus miopías con sus trajes limpios/mientras sueñan despiadadamente en sus jaulas comunes/sin olvidar sus desvelos de padres múltiples ni a su avidez/agachándose al recibir la orden cuando por distracción/algún número solitario cae al suelo para recogerlo y extenderlo/de nuevo sobre la mesa igual que a un hueso de ballena/…En nuestra sociedad de excluidos se ha producido un excedente increíble/de ceros a la izquierda los funcionarios no saben qué hacer/con sus esqueletos retorcidos como hierro viejo/bajo a las tormentas de papel/sus esqueletos aguardando salvación/sus esqueletos demasiado grandes donde ya no caben/que no saben qué hacer con su desmedida sed de lucro y su celo/ni qué hacer con el tamaño de todas sus desdichas/sus cadáveres exageradamente grandes/donde caben todos los difuntos.” Juan Calzadilla, “Esperando salvación,” Dictado por la jauría (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, October 1962): 7−8, Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (item 9, box 22).

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skilled as a draughtsman, Calzadilla teased out the same pivotal tension between death and the State machine in the work on paper Crónica de Caracas con cráneos de la Digepol of

1965 (see fig. 2.8). Taken as a pair, the poem and the drawing reveal the complexity of his challenge to institutional authority: the defeated entreguistas or so-called “taxidermists” who sustained the system often at their own expense were as culpable as its repressive apparatus.10

If the object of Calzadilla’s poem had been the failing political system, Daniel

González and Adriano González León’s Asfalto-Infierno (1963) was a frontal attack on the delusional nature of Caracas’ modernization. It provided another revealing example of how El Techo resorted to the guises of death and decay in their ceaseless assault on the cultural world surrounding them. Through multimedia juxtapositions of the former’s photographs and the latter’s texts, the publication transformed Caracas into the sharpened beast that González León described in the section titled “BESTIA AFILADA:”

A city of celestial circulation, branded by neon, pre-stressed concrete’s fast invention…Above, …, the ass of cars over his head, my head severed by bumpers, indigestion of muffler fumes, …, peoples’ heads imploring and basted by ads, you or I, whomever,…, jumping as an animal over the crosswalk,…with a stupid expression on his face and the guard who raises an arm like this, the other like that, against you, a pushover with his brains blown out from all the honking, as the cars smear us [in mud], disgusting grease, smoke, paper, shit, the rites and devotion to the tetraethyl lead that seizes us daily…Militants of an urban safari[:]you must tough it out with sharpened beasts in their workshops…the whole city on the brink of an explosion.11

10 González León, “Why the Whale?,” 269; and Ogaz, “La ballena, Jonás y lo majamámico,” in Rama, Antología, 217.

11 “Ciudad de circulación celeste, marcada por el neón, invención veloz del concreto pretensado….Por arriba, por su cabeza, el culo de los automovilistas sobre su cabeza, mi cabeza cortada por guardafangos, ahíta de humo de escape, tres neumáticos contra ella, gomas, ruedas, gomas, inflexión respiratoria, todos los mecanismos hidráulicos, las cabezas de las gentes implorantes y abobadas por los

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The literal transit through Caracas’ far from bucolic streets mirrored what Francisco Pérez

Perdomo described in Asfalto-Infierno’s prologue as “the frenzy of money as a challenge that extends beyond death…”12 The passage recalls George Bataille’s notion of the

accursed share. It is not by chance that his economic history serves to anchor El Techo’s

project; essentially it too focused on a critique of the Venezuelan economic model and

political landscape. In fact, Pérez Perdomo’s prologue rejected the thesis of petroleum as

the supposedly infallible engine of Venezuelan nation-building which had been predicated

ad nauseum and uncontested since the thirties when Arturo Uslar Pietri issued his famous

decree to “sow the oil.”13 Departing from this weakened position, González León proposed

oil as the driving force of a pestilent and chaotic city that was a far cry from the Utopian

project of modernity promoted throughout the perezjimenato (see figs. 1.8−1.13,

1.23−1.30).14 This literary portrait of a Hell on Earth found the perfect complement in

Daniel González’s photographs of the disquieting reality of elderly citizens scarred by wretchedness and solitude who, in their daily commutes, passed by a home offering

anuncios, usted o yo, cualquiera, así, con los brazos en cruz, ofendido, saltando como animal por entre las líneas blancas que acogen al peatón, pobre, desabrido, con el gran rostro de imbécil y el agente que levanta contra usted un brazo así, el otro así, monigote con el seso volado a pitazos mientras los autos nos embarran, grasa asquerosa, humo, papeles, mierda, rito y devoción del tetraetilo de plomo que nos embarga cada día…Militantes de un safari urbano, hay que vérselas con bestias bien afiladas en los talleres…la ciudad íntegra al borde de una explosión.” González León, “BESTIA AFILADA,” Asfalto-Infierno, 4.

12 “…el frenesí del dinero como un desafío que se extiende hasta la muerte rescatada por el taller mágico…” Francisco Pérez Perdomo, “[Hay ciertos rostros de la ciudad],” prologue to Asfalto-Infierno, 1−2, 1.

13 See Chapter 1, note 16.

14 See Chapter 1, “The Mirage of Progress,” 41−48.

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services that included the application of IV drips and injections as well as the proper

preparation of corpses for burial (figs. 5.1 a-c). These images heeded a potent warning to

the urbanites whose daily struggles within the “urban safari” would ultimately lead to

similar, isolated ends.

In another one of Asfalto-Infierno’s sections, “HIEROFANIA INVERTIDA” [The

Inversion of the Sacred], González León furthered the association of Caracas as the literal

inversion of Heaven and Hell by transferring the city’s spatial rearrangement to a heavenly

realm:

Corpses that outnumber any eligible statistic, fires, alliances, rule books expanded by the rural police, dogs trained at latifundia, and dispassionate groups that continue to shoot in the countryside; all proof that men have decided to divide up the Earth. The inversion has taken place and it is [now] our miserable below that conditions celestial change. Above, clouds are merely a white or purple emanation of cities…15

On the opposite page, González’s photograph of a grave with a painted sign that reads

“terreno propio” [privately owned] (fig. 5.2) extrapolated the metaphor to Caracas’ physical plane. Another photograph of a gloomy sign posted on a window’s wrought iron bars advertising the sale of dresses for the deceased captured a similar crude nonchalance regarding death and the demise of the human body (fig. 5.3). Both images were also decrees against the unchecked capitalism practiced in Venezuela at a time when it threatened to regulate material possessions and one’s buying power, even in death.

15 “Cadáveres que sobrepasan cualquier cifra elegible, incendios, alianzas, prontuarios, ampliados de las policías rurales, perros amaestrados en los latifundios y grupos imperturbables que todavía disparan en los montes, prueban que los hombres han decidido repartirse la tierra. Se hace la inversión y es nuestro miserable abajo quien condiciona un cambio celestial. Arriba, las nubes son solamente una emanación blanca o morada de las ciudades...” González León, “HIEROFANIA INVERTIDA,” Asfalto-Infierno, 26.

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Necrophilia

El Techo held Homenaje a la necrofilia at a garage on no. 16 Villaflor Street in

Sabana Grande. Negotiating the terms of the lease, in itself, had been quite a feat. Under the false pretense of a traditional art soirée, the group persuaded an elderly woman to rent them the space. Aray explained, “[she] loved art exhibitions. Her family enjoyed painting and poetry. She was a darling. We left that visit just as we had left our first communion.”16

The lady was certainly in for a shock when the exhibition opened a week later with the

“fanfare corresponding to a gallery at a garage, but also to a wake.” He recalled in the late nineties:

Everyone dressed in black. Women dressed for the occasion. And, the one-man-band sniffed out the act and played well into the night. We danced enthusiastically in fulfillment of the ritual of the inauguration [as well as] of the wake for those [decaying] innards along the walls.17

Such testimonies and a series of photographs from the El Techo de la Ballena Collection

at MoMA are the only existing records of opening night activities. The photographs

document how the gathering public walked in through a narrow driveway that, in between

the lady’s houseplants and her kitchen’s propane tanks, had been hastily decorated with

graffitied plywood announcing the exhibition, several poster boards with newspaper

16 Most of the play on words in the original Spanish language text is lost in translation here: “La señora amaba las exposiciones artísticas. En su familia se cultivaba la pintura y la poesía. Todo un primor. Salimos de aquella visita como de la primera comunión. (Carlos comulgaba con Dios más no con la hostia, a no ser las que recibió una y otra ocasión en las callejuelas de Salamanca).” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 130.

17 “Una semana después se abrió la exposición con los bombos y platillos que corresponde a una galería en un garaje, pero también en un velorio. Vestidos de negro. Las mujeres con trajes para la ocasión. Y, por demás, con el hombre orquesta, quien olfateó el acto y montó su concierto hasta muy altas horas de la noche. Se bailó con afán en cumplimiento del ritual de la inauguración, pues de velorio las tripas en las paredes.” Ibid.

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clippings, and the exhibition catalogue conspicuously attached to the home’s wrought iron

bars to the left (figs. 5.4 a-c). Eduardo Robles Piquer (1910−93), the exiled Spanish architect, cartoonist, and long-time art critic for Caracas dailies such as La Esfera and El

Nacional, described how interspersed among the signage, the group had placed a grave cross from the neighborhood cemetery of El Chacao as well as the timely warning “no dogs allowed”!18 Despite the scant documentation that exists on Homenaje a la necrofilia, I

believe that the group intended for the public to experience these materials as a preamble

to what was to come beyond the entrance to the garage itself. In other words, the driveway

was not merely a passageway to the gallery, which they appropriately identified by another

sign that read “El Techo de la Ballena.” Rather, it prepared the absent-minded attendees

for an unsuspected metaphorical journey into the gut of the whale.

In typical opening night fashion, the photographic record reveals how once properly

inside the gallery, Caracas’ well-heeled intelligentsia moved freely among the twelve

paintings and sculpture (figs. 5.5 a-c). In between the dancing and drinking, the public

partook in conversation, leaned in to closely admire the works, and perused the foldout

catalogue. The heavy stench of all decaying organic materials surrounding them, however,

left little question that something was fundamentally out-of-step with Homenaje a la

18 “…en el pequeño garaje alquilado como sede del ‘Techo de la Ballena’, junto con los rótulos aparece una cruz de madera procedente del citado cementerio de Chacao y un letrero en el cual se lee esta muy oportuna advertencia: ‘No se admiten perros’.” RAS [Eduardo Robles Piquer], “Huesos, vísceras, pieles y sangre como elementos pictóricos en Contramaestre: Resurge ‘El Techo de la Ballena’ con un homenaje a la necrofilia,” La Esfera de la cultura (Caracas), year 36, no. 12,448 (November 17, 1962): 10. ICAA Digital Archive no. 868651.

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necrofilia. In the unavoidable process of decomposition, as Robles Piquer announced,

Contramaestre’s paintings and sculptures were:

structures assembled from heads, femur ribs, shoulder blades and other animal bones bound together by plaster and [the acrylic-based finish] Resitex and combined with viscera, reproductions of placentas and furs, not quite of ermine. All of this covered in color that sometimes resembles blood and in other cases reminds us that we are in front of paintings.

If one could overlook their decomposing material structure and offensive smell, he wrote,

“it would not be hard to find artistic merit in [these] actual relief paintings, that can only be realized by someone with aesthetic sensibility.”19 Yet Contramaestre’s intent had been supra-artistic:

[I] alter an established order through an atrocious language using elements whose shape and development have been gestated in nature through millennia. I combine them in my pictures as signs of necrophiliac destructivism…I attack the senses through the evidence of the self in its most real and grittiest appearance. I condemn mankind’s helplessness against death...20

19 “…[un] conjunto de estructuras en que domina como elemento de enlace el yeso con resitex sujetando principalmente cabezas, fémures costillares, escápulas y otros huesos de animales con los que se combinan vísceras, reproducciones de placentas y pieles, no de armiño precisamente. Todo ello envuelto en color que imita unas veces sangre y otras hace recordar que estamos ante un cuadro o mejor dicho una pintura. Y empezamos por decir que si alguien es capaz de olvidarse de los ‘materiales’ descritos y del olor poco perfumado que algunos expiden aún, no será difícil encontrar valor artístico a las composiciones, verdaderas pinturas en relieve, que solo pueden ser realizadas por quien posee sensibilidad plástica.” RAS, “Huesos, vísceras, pieles y sangre,” 10. According to Edmundo Aray, RAS had actually been complicit with the balleneros in helping to orchestrate Homenaje a la necrofilia so it is not surprising that he viewed the canvases favorably. Aray, Nueva antología de El Techo de la Ballena (Mérida, Venezuela: FUNDECEM, 2014), 11−14, 12−13.

20 “Intento alterar un orden establecido, a través de un lenguaje atroz, utilizando elementos cuya forma y crecimiento se han gestado en la naturaleza a través de milenios, los cuales mezclo en mis cuadros como señal de destructivismo necrofílico. Sin profundizar en el ser, hiero los sentidos con la evidencia del mismo en su aspecto más real y descarnado. Pretendo acusar la posición de desamparo del hombre de hoy frente a la muerte y al am[o].” RAS, “Huesos, vísceras, pieles y sangre…,” 10. See Chapter 2, note 23 for more on a generational concern with destructivism.

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He proposed a Nietzschean “kind of [foul] beauty [that] appears among the folds of leather and the bowels of sacrificed lambs,” as González León wrote in his prologue to the catalogue for Homenaje a la necrofilia.21 In this sense, Contramaestre stated, the works were “necrophiliac curios.” He offered the wretched, those ugly souls who have become

undone by a “necrophiliac sexual lucidity,” an “orgasmic aesthetic” based on

“decomposing matter, semen-matter, placenta-matter…” And, the artist went on, the reek

of putrefaction revived the personages of his paintings from a “cosmic libido [that was not

always] far from [our own] existence [as they] sometimes emerge stained by another

victim’s blood.”22 With these art proposals, Contramaestre transported viewers to a dark wilderness not unlike the tainted panorama of Asfalto-Infierno; it was a launching pad for what Gonzáez León called the “categorical adventure from another dimension[: that of] love…within death.”23

21 “…toda una alienación de pestilencias informes, donde una belleza nueva asoma en cada repliegue del cuero y las vísceras de los carneros sacrificados, que no pasará inadvertida porque al menos provoca la repugnancia de las personas decentes o la sonrisa desdeñosa del que se piensa ya corrido en arte, con una tal ceguera y una tristeza mentales, que le impiden pronunciar otras palabras de defensa que no sean ‘dadaísmo’ o ‘infantilismo’.” Adriano González León, [“Siempre se habló del amor…”], in El Techo de la Ballena, Homenaje a la necrofilia (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, November 2, 1962), recto. ICAA Digital Archive no. 1097543. Translation by Laura Pérez with my minimal changes, in Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 265−67, 267.

22 “Ofrezco al hombre aporreado, tal vez desecho con una necrofílica lucidez sexual, una estética orgásmica en la que uso la materia en descomposición, la materia-semen, la materia-placenta, la materia-m. En fin, ‘souvenirs’ para necrofílicos. Y los personajes que hieden en mis cuadros viven en el cosmos libido, no siempre alejados de nuestros acaecer, pues a veces surgen teñidos con la sangre de otras víctimas.” RAS, “Huesos, vísceras, pieles y sangre…,” 10.

23 Emphasis mine. “….una aventura rotunda de otra dimensión: en lugar de ser hasta la muerte, es dentro de la muerte donde funciona el amor…” González León, [“Siempre se habló del amor…”], recto. Jiménez, Boulton and his Contemporaries, 266.

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Estudio para verdugo y perro [Study for executioner and dog], a 1962 mixed media on board that is one of two surviving works from the series (fig. 5.6), provides a compelling example of how Contramaestre redirected an informalist vocabulary towards far more ambitious aims.24 Here, he purposefully dragged us through the animate and the inanimate

materials of the picture by making us follow the contours of the jawbones and femurs

lodged between thick layers of cloth, hide, and pigment. In its overall coarseness,

contrasting palette of dark tones and blood red paint, and heavily built up substance,

Estudio para verdugo y perro recalled the dramatically torn and tattered Homúnculos

[Homunculi] series by Grupo El Paso’s Manolo Millares (fig. 5.7), whom the Venezuelan

recognized as kindred in the interest for animal hides.25 Contramaestre, however, took this

common concern with zoological remains to the extreme by incorporating, rather than merely invoking, actual decomposing cattle carcasses into his works. The strategy set him apart not only from Millares but also from an entire historical current extending from

Rembrandt (1606−69) (fig. 5.8) to Francis Bacon (1909−92) (fig. 5.9) to the Argentinean

Carlos Alonso (b. 1929) (fig. 5.10) that has exploited the expressive possibilities of such content. Relative to these artists, Contramaestre’s use and manipulation of animal remains

24 Juan Carlos Palenzuela notes that there is another of these works in the collection of José Moreno Colmenares in Caracas. Of this second extant example, he mentions: “se ha preservado, si bien los huesos han perdido la carne y sobresalen de ese ‘empaste violento’, como llamó Adriano González León, en la presentación de la exposición, el detritus de “tripas, mortajas, untos, cierres relámpagos, asbestina o cauchos en polvo desparramados sobre cartones y trozos de madera.” Palenzuela, Arte en Venezuela 1959−1979: de el Techo de la Ballena a 11 Tipos (Caracas: Banco Mercantil, 2005), 7.

25 Carlos Contramaestre, “La autopsia como experiencia límite en el informalismo venezolano o La poética del escalpelo sobre la materia efímera corrupta,” undated (but written sometime after the publication of Rama’s 1987 anthology), in Calzadilla, Ortega Oropeza, González, El Techo de la Ballena, 264−71, 270. Original manuscript in the Sala Arcaya, Biblioteca Nacional, Caracas.

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imbued his assemblages with a much more forceful symbolic weight; in incorporating dead materials, he literally transformed the works into the stand-ins for a national situation of political repression and violent death. In this sense, perhaps a more relevant referent could be found closer to home in the tiny fishing village of Macuto on the Venezuelan coast.

There, it is widely rumored that Armando Reverón’s (1889–1954) preparative rituals included rummaging through the town’s market for “the most brilliant red viscera” in order to “warm the eyes.”26

Unfolding the Prank

As in Para la restitución del magma (March 1961) and Homenaje a la cursilería

(May 7, 1961), a tantamount element of the overall experience of Homenaje a la necrofilia

was the foldable catalogue that El Techo distributed and displayed during its opening (fig.

5.11). Designed by Daniel González, the double-sided leaflet included texts and images

unified by a common fetishization of death, necrophilia, and other related degrading sexual

practices. The foldout established an uninterrupted line of visual questionings on mortality

beginning with sixteenth century engravings and ending with Contramaestre’s particular

26 Reverón, Contramaestre later recalled, passed down another one of El Techo’s fundamental mantras: “Detritus also results in light. That is art.” He stated: “Reverón con alguna variante, buscaba en los mercados las vísceras brillantes y rojas ‘para calentar los ojos.’ La ‘Investigación de las basuras’ de los balleneros encuentra en Reverón una percepción de su anticipación estética: ‘De la basura también sale la luz. Ése es el arte’.” Contramaestre, “La autopsia como experiencia límite en el informalismo venezolano,” 269. On Reverón’s preparatory rituals, see José Nucete Sardi, “Armando Reverón, un Gauguin moderno,” in Índice de Artes y Letras (Madrid), October 15, 1952; reprinted in Reverón, voces y demonios, ed. Juan Calzadilla (1990; reprint, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, 1998), 64.

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approach.27 When fully opened, on the right half of the foldout González assembled key

images including the 1747 engraving Human Skeleton with Young Rhinoceros by Jan

Wandelaar (Dutch, 1690–1759) (fig. 5.12), to which he gave heightened importance as the

pamphlet’s cover image. The etching gathered together a partially flayed human skeleton

with the immortal Clara, the Indian rhinoceros who famously toured Europe in the mid

eighteenth century.28 Immediately below it, the design incorporated a central title section

with several repetitions of the nursing whale motif first seen in Olaus Magnus’ Carta

Marina of 1539 (see fig. 3.19). Beneath it is a reproduction of the morbid anatomy of the

Transi de René de Châlon by Ligier Richier (c. 1500–1567) at the Church of Saint-Étienne

in the French city of Bar-le-Duc from 1547. This is an unusual sculptural vanitas depicting the deceased young Prince of Orange as a life-sized skeleton with strips of dried skin flapping over a heartless hollow carcass, his left arm holding a mirror reflecting his frayed

remains (fig. 5.13).

On the upper left hand quadrant of the unfolded sheet there is another collage made

up of El Greco’s (1541−1614) The Burial of the Count of Orgaz (1586−88)—“Conde

Orgaz mo” [Count Orgaz-m] in the caption—Flora cadavérica [Cadaverous Flora] (1962),

another of Contramaestre’s works from the exhibition (fig. 5.14), and two photographs of

the artist at work among the remains of cattle. The photograph on the left of the crossbar

27 Sean Nesselrode establishes this point with respect to necrophilia in “Defining the Aesthetic(s) of Negation in El Techo de la Ballena,” caiana. Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte (CAIA), no. 4 (2014): 1−7, 5.

28 For more on the tragicomic story of Clara’s encounter with Enlightenment Europe, see: Glynis Ridley, Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Atlantic Books, 2004).

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for this cruciform collage, “El artista en su taller” [The artist in his studio] by González

(fig. 5.15), illustrates the artist dissecting a large carcass carved up with the same surgical precision as Dr. Nicolaes Tulp performs an autopsy in Rembrandt’s famed anatomy lesson from 1632 (fig. 5.16). The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp had, in fact, been one of

Contramaestre’s referents in conceptualizing the matter-of-fact scatological approach of

Homenaje a la necrofilia along with the work of Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente [aka

Hieronymous Fabricius] (1533–c. 1619).29 Of the Italian surgeon and anatomist who

pioneered medical illustration and embryology, Contramaestre recounted how his

extraordinary anatomical paintings encouraged him to “explore the corporeal aspect of human and animal putrefactions.”30 In 1600, d’Acquapendente published Tabulae Pictae

[Painted tables], a compendium of twenty-one anatomical illustrations including the first

accurate rendition of the Sylvian fissure at the top right side of the brain (fig. 5.17).

Contramaestre’s Tres años más tarde [Three years later], a mixed-media collage/painting

from c. 1962 that was not included in the exhibition (fig. 5.18), reflects the Italian’s sound

naturalistic approach. Both avid dissectors, the realistic characterization of the billowy

pink sulcus and side branches of the Sylvian fissure in d’Acquapendente’s picture rivals,

in its grisly and exquisite beauty, the sinuous intestinal forms on the upper left hand corner

of Tres años más tarde. Perhaps their common medical background contributed to a

29 Contramaestre, “La autopsia como experiencia límite en el informalismo venezolano,” 270.

30 He said: “A mí me interesaban mucho las láminas anatómicas de él, sobre todo las de Anatomía Comparada. Eran extraordinarias pinturas y eso me animó a explorar lo corporal unido a putrefacciones humanas y animales.” Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 146.

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kindred rational and unsentimental approach to death. After all, Contramaestre once

surmised, the human body was nothing more than organic substance.31

El Techo was equally strategic in selecting texts for the foldout of Homenaje a la

necrofilia. Both components, the images and the literary excerpts, allowed the group to set

fundamental symbolic associations between Contramaestre’s work and a historical

tradition of erotic attraction to corpses. At the same time, these materials emphasized El

Techo and Contramaestre’s own desacralized views on death. Such a controversial position clashed sharply with the teachings and tenets of the pervasive Catholicism that continues to define Venezuelan morality. In verso, the catalogue included a passage from

“Homenaje a M. Ardisson” by Alfred Jarry, who pioneered the field of literature of the absurd. It also featured a note about Jarry by Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840−1902), author of the foundational Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) that popularized the use of mainstay terms such as masochism and sadism. Victor Ardisson (1872–?), known as the

“Vampire of Muy,” was a French gravedigger and necrophiliac rumored to have had sex with over one hundred corpses, especially those of young women, mutilating and decapitating them in some cases. This compounded practice led Krafft-Ebing to assert that his was a “horrible manifestation of sadism.”32 As the testimonial excerpt from

Psychopathia Sexualis notes, the initial deviant practices of public masturbation, the

ingestion of his own sperm, and drinking women’s urine (at once urophagia and urolagnia),

31 Contramaestre, “La autopsia como experiencia límite en el informalismo venezolano,” 270.

32 See Richard von Krafft-Eding, “Case 24: Necrophilia, Ardisson,” Psychopathia sexualis: with [e]special reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: a medico-forensic study (1886; reprint, New York: Rebamn Company, 1906).

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ultimately led Ardisson to necrophilia.33 In the foldout, El Techo confronted Krafft-

Ebing’s scientific approach with the irreverence of Alfred Jarry’s passage. Writing in apparent solidarity with Ardisson, whom he called a “virtuous citizen,” Jarry identified posthumous copulation as something “exceedingly excellent,” wondering if perhaps more men should engage in his countryman’s honest practices rather than in hypocritical burial rituals. “Survivors make great efforts to mitigate [the affronts of the deceased] with floral offerings and wreaths adorned with testimonies of their affections…” Yet these practices were of little consequence, he wrote as he rationalized Ardisson’s anger with “such fallacious inscriptions.”34 As this excerpt reinforced, ultimately what linked Contramaestre and El Techo to Jarry was not only the deviant sexual practice to which they were all drawn to, but also a common interest in laughter and provocation as productive lines of intellectual inquiry.35

33 From the Spanish language version reprinted by El Techo: “[Victor] Ardisson, nacido en 1872, pertenece a una familia de criminales y alienados. En la puerta se masturbaba. Acostumbraba a ingerir su propia esperma “para no perderla”. Bebía los orines de las mujeres. No veía nada malo en ello. Con el tiempo llegó a la necrofilia. Desenterraba cadáveres femeninos, desde niñas de tres años hasta mujeres de sesenta. Practicaba sobre el cadáver el succio mamae, el cunnilinctus y raramente el coito o la mutilación. Una vez trasladó a su casa la cabeza de una mujer. Otra vez el cadáver de un niño de tres años y medio. Se hizo sepulturero. Gustaba alimentarse con gatos y ratas. Después del entierro de una joven de diecisiete años que tenía senos hermosos, el deseo en desenterrar cadáveres se apoderó nuevamente de él. Cometió después muchísimas de estas profanaciones. Besaba con frecuencia una cabeza que había llevado a su casa, llamándola su prometida. Confesó sin vueltas y riéndose. Su inteligencia no es débil; tiene un alto sentido moral. En prisión no se quejaba.” Richard von Krafft-Ebing in El Techo de la Ballena, Homenaje a la necrofilia, verso.

34 From the Spanish language version reprinted by El Techo: “De cualquier forma que sea, conscientes de la afrenta a los muertos, los sobrevivientes se esfuerzan en mitigarla con ofrendas, lores y coronas, adornadas con declamatorios testimonios de afecto y no seguidos de efecto. No es sorprendente que durante su carrera de sepultero, M. Ardisson se indignase por esas inscripciones falaces y decidiese dar el ejemplo que debiera haber ofrecido todo hombre honesto, probando su amor por la humanidad muerta con expansiones más innegables. Alfred Jarry, “Homenaje a M. Ardisson,” in Ibid.

35 “A la hora de elegir un género elige el género de la risa, el más puro y el más contaminado de todos…Al fin de cuentas se trata de la ‘morbosidad sublime’ que Lautreamont creía experimentar ante la inocencia de los grandes mamíferos. Un sentimiento de culpabilidad enraizado a la vaga sensación del placer

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On another section of the back of the foldable catalogue, a pseudo-scientific presentation recalling Contramaestre’s own medical background offered categorizations of necrophiliac behavior (fig. 5.19). It presented some of its most remarkable patients as evidence for the irrefutable existence of related pathologies. The ordering revealed how

Juana la Loca [Joanna of Castile (1479−1555), aka Joanna the Mad]36 exemplified

NECROPHILIAC JEALOSY because of her denial to leave her husband’s remains in a nunnery for fear that the sisters would engage in illicit relations with the corpse. Sextus

Propertius, the Latin elegiac poet of the Augustan age, suffered from LATINUS

NECROFILICUS due to his continued longing for his beloved Cynthia even after her earthly demise.37 And, as a final case, FUNCTIONAL NECROFILIA described the stench of mankind’s modern condition: humans “submerged in cancerous growths…intestines full of post-mortem shit” from whose magma of domestic death emerged “monsters that attack museums.”38 The final text that El Techo included in the publication reaffirmed its

absoluto.” Juan Calzadilla, “Arte y Letra N no. 171: La pintura de Carlos Contramaestre,” Panorama (Maracaibo) LII, no. 16,944 (September 3, 1967). ICAA Digital Archive no. 868632. 36 Joanna married Philip the Handsome, of the House of Habsburgs. After her mother, Isabel of Castile died, the couple briefly ruled Castile (1504−1506). When Philip died in 1506, Joanna became mentally ill and was confined to a nunnery for the rest of her life. Although she was legally queen of Spain throughout this time, her father Ferdinand of Aragón and later her son Charles (I of Spain, V of the Holy Roman Empire) ruled in her place.

37 Born around 50−45BC (died in 15BC), his surviving work comprises four books of Elegies that are dominated by the figure of a single woman, one he refers to throughout his poetry by the pseudonym Cynthia. She is named in over half the elegies of the first book and appears indirectly in several others. Ezra Pound cast Propertius as something of a satirist and political dissident in his poem “Homage to Sextus Propertius” of 1917. Pound’s translation and loose interpretation of the elegies presented them as ancient examples of his Imagist theory of art that stressed the isolation of objects through the use of clear, sharp language—or what he called ponti luminosi (“luminous details”). See: J.P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius; A Study in Creative Translation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964).

38 From the Spanish language version reprinted by El Techo: “Sumergidos en excrecencias cancerosas mostramos un cadáver, úlceras purulentas, livideces azules, intestinos llenos de mierda post- mortem, genitales sangrientos como rosas de otra primavera. Todo en espera de nuevas fornicaciones. Luego

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alignment with the Venezuelan underclasses, even if in the context of a far from popular

and degenerate sexual practice enjoyed by few and which offended this segment’s own sensibilities. I am referring to an October 1962 interview with the notorious gravedigger

Eleuterio Ramos from the local cemetery in the Caracas neighborhood of Chacao who, when asked about his position regarding relationships with dead paramours, responded coyly: “It is very possible for a man to be with a dead woman…, I’ve heard musical compositions that have to do with that.”39

Hygienization

The separate movements of medicalization and hygienization often converged in

the process of modernizing the physical space of Latin American cities during the first half

of the twentieth century. In Venezuela, these notions emerged as principal elements of a

national imperative to rationalize populations and productivity around controlled spatial

and architectural environments such as Maurice Rotival’s original Plan Monumental de

Caracas (known colloquially as the Plan Rotival) of 1938−39 and Carlos Raúl

Villanueva’s superbloques from the fifties.40 In this context, it is not surprising that

es evidente que la postema se conjuga con los objetos más insólitos, y en ese magma de muerte doméstica surgen los monstruos que atentan contra los museos.” Quoted from Ensayos sobre las rectificaciones plásticas y sexuales (Boston: F. Mowley, Inc., 1961) in El Techo de la Ballena, Homenaje a la necrofilia, verso.

39 “Es muy posible que un hombre esté con una mujer muerta…, he oído composiciones de música que tratan sobre eso. —¿Por qué vive usted aquí? —Yo tenía a mi mamá por ahí…, por allá la esposa…y más allá los hijos…Así losa veo a todos juntos. Voy a casa de uno…voy a casa del otro.” El Techo de la Ballena, Homenaje a la necrofilia, verso.

40 The Plan Rotival was commissioned, yet never adopted, by the administration of José Eleazar López Contreras in the late thirties. In the forties, Rotival was tapped to execute the design of its central artery, Avenida Bolívar (1945−49), which in the context of his original plan would have served as a

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Homenaje a la necrofilia lasted only a few days before Caracas’ urban sanitation unit forcibly closed for its evident unsanitary aspects. All but a handful of the works were confiscated and destroyed by municipal authorities.41 The implicit censorship of this

retribution was no doubt also influenced by the backlash over Contramaestre’s proposal.

The local press touted the exhibition as a “repugnant and degenerate [Marxist] deviation

of eroticism” that “morally degraded consciousness” and threatened to destroy the

“Christian concept of the pious death.”42 According to some critics, Homenaje a la necrofilia harmed and corroded the “dignity of the Papacy” and constituted an “attack against respectable institutions…in favor of the engagement of abject practices.”43 The

monumental corridor for planned government buildings. For more on the Plan Rotival, see: El Plan Rotival: la Caracas que no fue. 1939−1989, ed. Marta Vallmitjana (Caracas: Ediciones Instituto de Urbanismo, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1991). For Rotival’s connections to the French Musée social (est. 1894) and his important role in influencing social welfare policy in Venezuela, see Luis González Casas, “Modernity and the City: Caracas 1935−1958.” For Villanueva’s architectural work and its relationship to quality of life issues, see Chapter 1, note 43.

41 Edmundo Aray reflected on the perishable nature of these works: “El arte es perecedero. Sólo tres pinturas y una cantidad similar de esculturas de la exposición ‘Homenaje a la necrofilia’ escaparon del aseo urbano. Cuento una anécdota: En esa época mi hija María Julieta tenía tres años. Vivíamos en Bello Monte. En la sala del apartamento tenía dos esculturas del Homenaje a la Necrofilia, que había escogido por considerarla menos perecederas que los cuadros, fuente inagotable de gusanos desde la medianoche misma de la exposición. En atención a la verdad, Carlos no había manejado con propiedad sus instrumentos de trabajo, huesos y vísceras. No los incineró debidamente. Días después de haber instalado las esculturas oigo un grito de terror: era de Zonia Azparren, la madre de María Julieta. Pregunto: ¿qué pasa? ¿por qué ese escándalo? Zonia responde: ¡bota esa vaina!, ¡esto es de horror! Por los huesos de la escultura se movía a sus anchas un gusano que parecía una culebra. En medio de la histeria aquella las esculturas encontraron en un basurero su destino último.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 138−39.

42 “La publicación repulsiva, condenada unánimemente por amplios sectores, no puede ocultar su intención marxista, pues plantea la abyecta teoría de destruir el concepto cristiano de la muerte piadosa para sustituirlo por prácticas perversas; el comunismo no es ajeno a la publicación de esta hoja en la que se intente degradar moralmente la conciencia.” “Nauseabundas Aberraciones Sexuales Elogia Folleto Hecho en la Universidad. Con la complicidad del Rector De Venanzi, la Imprenta de nuestra Primera Casa de Estudios lanza costoso panfleto de ponzoñosa e impía pornografía,” La esfera (Caracas), November 17, 1962: 1.

43 “Aparte de las ilustraciones, que muestran cadáveres, detritus y deyecciones, el texto del panfleto sostiene una agraviante e impía teoría escrita relativa a la necrofilia o sea la afición a la muerte y a la coprología, término éste que se refiera a las características de las materias cloacales. Se estampa allí en un nutrido texto la teoría abyecta de que hay que destruir el concepto cristiano de la muerte piadosa para

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publication’s “irreproducible works and…most abhorrent deviations” reputedly appalled even the workers of the print shop at the UCV where the catalogue had been printed clandestinely.44 Thus, the general consensus seems to have been that the exhibition and publication elicited “horror,” “disgust,” “repugnance,” and even “nausea.”45 All of these

were key components of the broadest response to the uncanny. Therefore, it is no surprise

that from Paris, many Latin American painters—including the Cuban painter Jorge

Camacho (1934−2011), who was long admired by André Breton himself—lauded the

exhibition as both an assertion of the surrealist spirit and an important allegory for the

sociopolitical violence of their time.46

As a unified corpus (comprised of a theatrical opening night, an audacious exhibition title, the blasphemous content on the foldout, and the material decomposition of the ephemeral artworks themselves) Homenaje a la necrofilia did not merely sully

sustituirlo por prácticas consistentes en efectuar acoplamientos íntimos con los moribundos y con los cadáveres…Mucho más de lo dicho hay en el abominable folleto que comentamos, pero no es posible referirlo.” Unidentified university professor writing anonymously, “Aberraciones Eróticas Difunde Panfleto Pornográfico hecho en la Universidad: Se Exige al Rector Que Explique Quien Autorizó la Impresión,” El Mundo (Caracas) (November 16, 1962). ICAA Digital Archive no. 1060229.

44 Ibid.

45 See, for example, the previously cited newspaper articles “Aberraciones Eróticas Difunde Panfleto Pornográfico hecho en la Universidad: Se Exige al Rector Que Explique Quien Autorizó la Impresión” and “Nauseabundas aberraciones sexuales elogia folleto hecho en la Universidad.” Also, Marco Chacín, “¿Necrofilia o iracundia histérica?,” La esfera de cultura (Caracas), November 17, 1962. Similarly, the artist Pedro Centeno Vallenilla, whose outdated painting had been the object of frequent lashes by El Techo, as in Homenaje a la cursilería (see Chapter 4), declared that the artifices of Homenaje a la necrofilia suffered from the deviation of a “savage that enjoys excrement.” See: “Declara Pedro Centeno Vallenilla: Defensores del folleto con aberraciones sexuales obedecen al complejo del salvaje que goza comiendo inmundicias...,” Últimas Noticias (Caracas), November 24, 1962. ICAA Digital Archive no. 865836.

46 “Vieron en [el homenaje] una reivindicación del espíritu surrealista y una alegoría de la violencia política y social de los sesenta.” Luis Alberto Crespo, “El Techo de la Ballena, un invento Borgiano,” El Diario de Caracas, September 20, 1991; in Aray, Nueva antología, 13.

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bourgeois views on death and the Christian dogma of resurrection as many critics of the

time believed. Rather, this Gesamtkunstwerk recalled the nonrestrictive interdisciplinary

activities of the international network of artists associated with Fluxus and their pivotal

notion of “Intermedia.”47 It represented a much more complex critique against larger

political and aesthetic conditions. Politically, it was an undeniable decree against

international events such as the previous year’s Bay of Pigs Invasion in Cuba, the localized

vendetta of death unleashed by the Betancourt administration, as well as the increasing

fallout from a failing capitalist system in Venezuela.48 Aesthetically, it allowed El Techo

to pronounce themselves in opposition to all sorts of conventional “art objects” that had

been the historical accomplices of such sociopolitical events.49 In its penchant for

destruction, Homenaje a la necrofilia also aligned El Techo with the shock value of Dada

and foregrounded the old surrealist compulsion to both separate and reconcile the

contradictory drives of death and desire.50 Most importantly, however, it linked the group

with an emerging worldwide avant-garde that sought to reverse an increasingly more normalized mainstream, which in Venezuela had found its leading voice in geometric- abstraction and later within another antagonistic current: Informalism. Coupled with the collective’s upside-down creativity, the exhibition’s radical content eroded the restrictive

47 See Introduction, note 8.

48 See Chapter 1, “The Site of Paradise,” for a comprehensive examination of the broader sociopolitical context.

49 Contramaestre, “La autopsia como experiencia límite,” 270.

50 Certainly, as Hal Foster notes in the context of the surrealists, the “point where desire and death interpenetrate in a way that brooks no affirmative reconciliation” is, in fact “the very punctum of the uncanny.” Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 17.

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homogenization of this uncomfortably tight high-brow culture. El Techo’s inverted life cycle, or that transit from death to bliss that they had referred to as the restitution of magma since their first exhibition, had the added effect of, at least momentarily, revivifying

Caracas’ spent cultural environment.

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EPILOGUE – SLIPPING AND SLIDING

… la Ballena deja su peripecia natatoria para que la examinen los Pescadores que vienen detrás.

—Adriano González León, 19641

El Techo de la Ballena began to disintegrate in 1964, merely three years after its inception. By April of that year, Adriano González León had already arrived at the resolute certainty that the group had run its course. As he put it in an unpublished interview with

Clara Fernández Moreno, who was José Antonio Vasco’s wife:

Indeed, everything comes from the rear-guard: old literature, old art, rhetoric, demagogical realism, intellectualism, professors, sectarians, Betancourt’s police force, and [even] the US Marines. It seems feeble to ponder what will become of La Ballena [because] it did not have a beginning and it will not have an end. God continues with his pestering but Jonah no longer abides by his orders.2

Several factors contributed to the internal schism. On the aesthetic front, there were those

like Carlos Contramaestre and Edmundo Aray, who had already arrived at the radical

position thatliterature and painting, Informalism in particular, had little merit beyond that

1 Adriano González León, unpublished interview with Clara Fernández Moreno, 1964. In Vasco, “Introducción al Techo de la Ballena,” 350.

2 “No creo que mi opinión sobre la Ballena agregue nada importante a lo que hemos hecho, la Ballena deja su peripecia natatoria para que la examinen los Pescadores que vienen detrás. Y detrás viene todo: la vieja literatura, el arte Viejo, la retórica, el realismo demagógico, el intelectualismo, los profesores, los sectarios, la policía de Betancourt y los infantes de marina norteamericanos. En cuanto a lo que será La Ballena mañana, resulta tonto responderlo. La Ballena no ha tenido principio ni tendrá fin. De allí a que Dios se la pase fastidiado. Jonás ya no acata sus órdenes.” Ibid.

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of pretextes for political protest and scandal. In its stead they had adopted “art terrorism”

as the necessary tactic for their visual and literary work. Other, more moderate artists

within El Techo—Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Hugo Baptista, and even Juan

Calzadilla—allowed themselves to pursue artistic careers while simultaneously assuming

their political activities as risky but nevertheless personal interventions that paralleled their

artistic production. Moreover, on the political front, Betancourt’s hardline approach

intensified in 1964 and led to the militarization of an extreme political Left that included

many balleneros. Their varying degrees of allegiances to political forces including the

MIR, the PCV, and its militant FLN and guerrilla FALN fronts, certainly detracted

attention from the group’s artistic and literary activities. With important members detained

or operating in clandestinity to avoid further persecution, El Techo underwent irreparable

fissures.3

Nonetheless, the group’s indomitable spirit could not be easily contained. It

emerged once more in October 1964, when it published a compilation of texts denouncing

Christianity as a system of spiritual servitude in the Caracas daily Clarín. The documents

had originally appeared two years earlier, in France, in the context of an antireligious

tribute to Oskar Panizza (1853−1921), the German psychiatrist, avant-garde writer, and

author of the controversial L’Immaculée Conception des Papes (1894). Jorge Camacho, the Paris-based Cuban Surrealist and El Techo sympathizer, organized the tribute at Galerie

3 1964 was, in fact, the year of the imprisonment of González León, the detainment and interrogation of Mary Ferrero (his wife) and Daniel González, and the deportation of Ángel Luque over the Smolen Affair. See Chapter 1, note 46.

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Raymond. Appropriately titled “Para aplastar al infinito” [To crush infinity], the

Venezuelan compilation included writings by such famed questioners of the Catholic faith

as the Comte de Lautréamont, Sylvian Maréchal, Nietzsche, and William Blake. It ended

with the following reflection: “Everything that produces vacillation, suspicion, infamy,

[and is] sullied and grotesque, can be summarized by this word: God.”4 Echoing similar

events in France, forty-nine Venezuelan religious organizations—Caritas, multiple

religious confraternities and Catholic youth brigades, as well as such veritable institutions as the Asociación de Caballeros de San Vicente de Paul or the Junta a Favor de los Leprosos

de Venezuela—denounced the “obscene, slanderous and blasphemous” texts and stood,

united, under the decree: “Venezuelans Cannot be Fooled: Christianity is Firmly

Entrenched in Venezuela.”5 In response to the local backlash against El Techo, the Parisian

Surrealists sent a statement of solidarity: “…we condemn that the [Catholic] Church continues to attempt to use its dark influence in order subject nations and individuals to an intolerable state of intellectual and physical misery.” It was signed by such international personalities as Fernando Arrabal, Roger Blin, Roberto Matta, Maurice Nadeau, the French caricaturist Siné (Maurice Sinet), Tristán Tzará, and, of course, Camacho (along with his wife Margarita).6 This was El Techo’s last scandal and also the beginning of the end.

4 “Todo lo que hay de vacilante, de sospechoso, de infame, de mancillado y de grotesco, se condensa para mí en esta palabra: Dios.” El Techo de la Ballena [signed Heráclito], “Para aplastar al infinito,” Clarín (Caracas) (October 18, 1963), n/p. In Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 297−302, 297.

5 “…publicación obscena, injuriosa y blasfema.” Their headline read: “Pero el Pueblo de Venezuela No se Deja Engañar: El Cristinaismo Tiene un Arraigo Muy Firme en Venezuela.” El Techo de la Ballena, rayado sobre el techo 3, 59.

6 “…constatamos, y al mismo tiempo denunciamos, que la Iglesia pretende usar todavía su influencia tenebrosa con objeto de mantener a pueblos y a individuos en un estado intolerable de miseria intelectual y física.” Ibid., 62.

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Despite this early blow in 1964, Aray, Calzadilla, and Contramaestre kept the group

more or less alive through the end of the decade. They ensured the dissemination of its

guiding principles though an art gallery, exhibitions, and literary publications. In April

1965, they opened a permanent gallery, Galería del Techo, at the Sabana Grande

neighborhood (Calle Real, Edificio Pacífico, Local “L”). The group inaugurated the space

with an exhibition of recent works by Roberto Matta (1911−2002), Roberto Matta: La llave de los campos. The significance of Matta’s presence in Caracas early in 1965 cannot be underestimated: his life-long involvement in political action and causes for social justice may have certainly drawn the Chilean artist to the revolutionary spawning ground that

Venezuela had quickly become in the mid-sixties as well as, more specifically, to the terrorist stance that El Techo had already assumed by this time.7

Between 1965 and 1967, the Galería del Techo kept up a frenetic pace of exhibitions—sixteen of these in 1965 alone. As if making up for lost time, the group presented work by a number of local and international collaborators in exhibitions that included Jorge Camacho: Historia del ojo (opened on May 21, 1965), Jacobo Borges: Las

7 Throughout the span of his long career, Matta incorporated his political thought in works that included: the 1937 drawing La guerra en civil; La tierra es un hombre; the script that he wrote in condemnation of the assassination of Federico García Lorca, a family friend, in 1936; Les roses sont belles, a 1951 painting that alludes to the trial against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—two communist Jewish Americans who in 1953 were convicted and executed for conspiracy to commit espionage during a time of war; La Pregun-tortura (1957), on the torture of French-Algerian journalist Henri Alleg during the Algerian War (1954–1962); Burn, Baby Burn (1967), Matta’s defense of the Vietnamese people at the height of the conflict with the Viet Cong; Les Juges partent en guerre (1967) about the Nuremberg Trials (1945–46); and La vida Allende la muerte (1973) on the 1973 Chilean coup d’état which ousted Allende and led to his suicide. Matta spent periods of 1963 and 1964 in Cuba where, from his base at Casa de las Américas, moved within a circle of intellectuals that included the writer Edmundo Desnoes, who may have provided the introduction to El Techo. For more on Matta’s work in Cuba, see, by Desnoes, “El viaje de Matta,” Casa (Havana) no. 20−21 (September-December 1963), 29−33.

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jugadoras (July 4, 1965), Paolo Gasparini: Cómo son los heroes (August 6, 1965), Rogelio

Polesello: Pinturas laicas (January 29, 1966), and Siné: SinéBallena (in April 1967). Yet, despite of this trajectory, “La Ballena did not find happiness in the gallery,” as Vasco, writing in the early seventies, perceptively explained.

No matter how much of a revolutionary you are, to have a gallery implies [participation in] the offering of luxury objects to a privileged public. It doesn’t matter if you are showing rebellious pictures: people buy them and take them home…La Ballena d[id] not enjoy selling anything. Its world [wa]s not one of competition but [rather] of confraternity.8

At root, there was an ideological posture that prevented El Techo’s most committed proponents from attaining complete fulfilment from this commercial venture. Although the collective continued to show in 1966 and into 1967, the effort symbolically concluded with the aptly titled group exhibition La Ballena cierra el Techo on March 20, 1966.9

Dámaso Ogaz’s permanent relocation to Venezuela in 1967 imbued the waning effort with a vitality that resulted in a short-lived period of intensified publishing activity

8 “Pero la Ballena no era feliz en la Galería. Por más revolucionario que tú seas, tener una galería es ofrecer objetos de consume privilegiado. No importa que muestres cuadros rebeldes: la gente los compra y los lleva a su casa. El dinero digiere cualquier alimento [ideológico]. Bernard Shaw fue muy apreciado por la clase media inglesa y hoy día el Che se ha convertido en un poster que las mejores familias cuelgan en la sala (o en el living, por ser más castizos). …Y bien, a la Ballena no le gusta vender nada. Su mundo no es el de la competencia, sino el de la fraternidad.” Vasco, “Introducción al Techo de la Ballena,” 352.

9 Documentation on this exhibition is scant; however, the accompanying catalogue included a poem by Vasco that has been reprinted on several occasions. Titled “Prohibido pasar (ensayo retórico),” it recorded El Techo’s frustration and disdain for the Western lifestyle that was firmly implanted in Venezuela by 1966: “No puedo pasar por aquí no hay puerta no hay llave/no hay más que la roca y la baba y no hay nada que hacer/…/No nada ni el cuerpo maniatado hasta los ojos podrá/sacar de los bolsillos una gota de sangre para el/peaje…ni la familia se moverá un milímetro de su retrato de las Bodas de Oro/de la Edad de Oro de la conquista del espacio de nada/de la civilización occidental de nada de la alianza/para el progreso de nada de la Producción en Masa/de no hay nada que hacer.” Juan Antonio Vasco, “Prohibido pasar (ensayo retórico),” in Calzadilla et al., El Techo de la Ballena, 254−55.

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but the momentum came to a crashing halt with the Caracas earthquake of July 29, 1967.10

In 1968, El Techo completed its last collective publication—Salve, amigo, salve y adiós

[Hail friend, hail and farewell]—with contributions by Aray, Contramaestre, Hurtado,

Calzadilla, Ogaz, Javier Domingo, Marcia Leyseca, and Tancredo Romero. 1968 was a watershed year that marked not only the near extinction of guerilla activities in Venezuela, but also a great disheartenment among the Latin American Left following Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. Events in France in May also represented a moral turning point through the momentary disruption to that country’s capitalist economy. For the many Latin Americans who, at that very time, struggled against repressive regimes, the

French student protests and worker strikes rekindled hopes for more just social structures of their own.11 In Caracas, too, students gathered in protest at the UCV that year. Although

these local actions reflected “the aesthetic tenets and conceptions about the act of artistic

creation professed by El Techo de la Ballena,” the group itself was finished.12 Some of the

most committed balleneros had already begun to disperse into other groups with different

ideological principles. Caupolicán Ovalles published in the journal Tabla Redonda and

the key figures of Aray and Efraín Hurtado departed in January 1969 to establish the even

more radical newsprint Rocinante. The latter was named not after Don Quixote’s horse,

10 Among the works that were completed and published at this time were Ogaz’s La ballena y lo majamámico (November 1967), the script for Pozo Muerto (1967) by Aray and collaborators, and Caupolicán Ovalles’ Elegía en rojo a la muerte de Guatimocín, mi padre, alias El Globo (1967).

11 There were similar student-led upheavals against military and bureaucratic elites in Rio de Janeiro (the Passeata dos Cem Mil [March of One Hundred Thousand], held on June 26, 1968) and also at Tlatelolco (in Mexico City on October 2, 1968).

12 Rama, “Of Terrorism in the Arts,” 122.

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but rather, after the famous line from Che’s last letter to his parents in 1965: “Once again

I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rocinante. Once more, I’m on the road with my shield on my arm.”13

During the height of their productivity, much of El Techo’s experimentation had

focused on eroding disciplinary distinctions. However, by 1968 most of its members had

returned to traditional forms of individual artistic creation. Certainly, as Ángel Rama

noted, this illogical turn to “…the book, the individual craft, art” heralded the end of the

group’s “art terrorism.”14 Perhaps its members could no longer find meaning in

pronouncements hinging on provocation and political action at a time when these very

values gained traction among Caracas’ increasingly more radicalized intellectual milieu.

Perhaps El Techo’s aggressive stance became normalized as the new status quo for the

Venezuelan establishment.

In 1969 González León won the prestigious Premio Internacional de Novela Seix

Barral for his epic novel País Portátil (1968), which contrasted the parallel realities of a

sordid archaic rural world and that of urban populations besieged by mechanization and

advertising. Similarly, at the end of the sixties Juan Calzadilla emerged as one of the

leading Venezuelan art historians. By the early seventies he was on his way to occupying

13 Ernesto Che Guevara, [Carta de despedida del Che a sus padres], April 1, 1965. Reprinted, among many other sources in Jon Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2010), 599.

14 “El movimiento, como hijo directo de una circunstancia histórica, se diluye a medida que ella se transmute, pierde sus características y cede a las formas más tradicionales de la creación: el libro, la tarea individual, el arte. Es la confirmación del fracaso y una derrota en que se inicia el sálvese quien pueda consabido. El terrorismo ha concluido su ciclo, al menos por ahora, y los terroristas han sobrevivido a sus atentados: deben vivir en la sociedad y en la cultura que intentaron derribar.” Rama, Antología, 37.

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a number of important posts at official cultural institutions. The complicity of these and

other balleneros with the mainstream’s co-optation of their work and position represented

yet another example of the eternal paradox of the avant-garde. Indeed, as Rama described,

“the [art] terrorists [of El Techo] survived their attacks [by learning to live within] society and the culture that they had sought to topple.”15 In their will to renew Venezuelan art, El

Techo had been painfully aware of the similar fates of the international avant-gardes that

preceded them (Surrealism, Dadaism and Informalism among them). Perhaps this is why

years later Aray saved some grace by reconciling the group’s legacy not in terms of its radical suicidal tactics (incorruptible humor, critical attitude, resolute honesty) but, rather, in terms of its undisputed contributions to Venezuelan graphic design.16

15 Ibid.

16 “Yo diría que El Techo de la Ballena (y aquí hago una especie de llamado) y, en general los pintores informalistas que estuvieron ligados al Techo, transformaron el arte del diseño gráfico en el país. Fue una auténtica renovación. Inclusive siete u ocho años después del Techo, nos era grato ver, en las publicaciones de la prensa cotidiana, diagramaciones o usos de la fotografía, del contraste etc., que nunca habían sido utilizadas antes del Techo y que no eran sino el resultado de la influencia Ballenera. En ese sentido, insisto, El Techo de la Ballena, jugó un importante papel. Entonces, no era sólo en la pintura, en la fotografía, en el diseño gráfico, sino también en la palabra escrita, en la literatura.” Aray in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 128−29.

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CONCLUSION – A LEXICON FOR EL TECHO DE LA BALLENA

Nosotros, los escritores y pintores de El Techo de la Ballena, nos permitimos establecer una posibilidad de resurrección estando vivos; nos permitimos una posibilidad de muerte, si esa muerte es para establecer en este pedazo de tierra con mucho mar una sociedad nueva, rigurosamente nueva.

—Caupolicán Ovalles, 19641

El Techo de la Ballena was among the first groups within the countercultural movement emerging during the sixties to question the structural inequalities that undermined the true reach of modernity in Venezuela. The group engaged a wide array of modern anti-aesthetic languages in a practice made far more complex by its own paradoxes.

It was a project that was both optimistic yet frightful, critical yet redemptive, specific yet all-encompassing, contemporary yet archaic, vital yet reliant on death. My dissertation exposed just a few of the contradictions that undermined El Techo’s proposals.

Fortunately, there remains abundant material that will allow other scholars to continue to expand our understanding of the points of references, specific contours, and reach of the group’s multidimensional work. Perhaps the best way to reconcile the evident opositions at the root of El Techo is to return briefly to some of the key paradigms that surfaced in my interpretative reading. Lopsided Modernity was El Techo’s diagnosis of Venezuelan

1 Ovalles, “Contraseñas,” 28.

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development in a national context. Contemporaneity as a Paradise Lost, The Whale as a

Contingent Milieu, Fluidity as “the roof of the whale,” and Art as a Total Enterprise

anchored the collective’s specific project.

Lopsided Modernity

To speak of El Techo is to speak of the singularities of the Venezuelan experience at midcentury. The period had been one of firsts: new technological and infrastructural

development, new industry, new modes of government, new wealth, new visual and poetic

idioms, new apertures to the international art circuit, and even a “new” Caracas. Yet these

firsts never fully fulfilled national expectations for a new and more equitable society. On

the contrary, the Utopian projection of order and progress that was promoted in Venezuela

through functionalist architecture and modern urban planning actually established the

geopolitical limits of an even more segregated social reality for its citizenry. In the visual

arts too the several genealogies of Constructivism the country embraced were almost

always made available exclusively to elite audiences. In essence, at the moment when El

Techo formed, socioeconomic conditions became the determinant factor that narrowed the

reach of modern architectural spaces, of innovative works of art, and even of Caracas’

evolving physiognomy.

The availability of vast petroleum reserves literally masked a fundamental

structural problem in the country. Oil revenue facilitated the importation of the mainstays

of First World modernity—buildings, highways, spaces for consumption, goods, popular

culture, and so on. Yet by adopting an extreme form of an expedited modernization

modelled after Europe and the United States, characterized by continuous and vertiginous

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change, Venezuelans skipped over the developmental process that such a project

underwent elsewhere. In Venezuela, there was little time to assimilate the social changes

that accompanied the process. In fact, Venezuelan modernity, which dependent on an

outward projection of “order/rationality,” achieved through aesthetic and architectural

modernism, and “progress,” achieved through modernization, was out-of-step with the

reality of the country’s laggard agricultural peasantry and lower rungs of the petrochemical

workforce. In its haste to construct a new version of their country, Venezuelans

misconstrued the disparate “modernization/modernity/modernism” triad and rarely

recognized the true implications of each of these fundamental concepts. Modernization

should have been regarded as a transitory phase of economic, social, and technological development. Modernism should have been understood as a worldwide cultural and aesthetic movement based on more complex transnational interconnections. Moreover, the most elusive of the three, modernity, should have been identified with a global set of attitudes that pervaded multiple dimensions of human enterprise and where social and economic processes converged with ideologies of progress, secularization, and emancipation. On the contrary, in Venezuela a fragmentary modernization and a faulty idea of modernism were put forth in the name of a universal model of modernity. Through its inherent lopsidedness, the Venezuelan social experiment at midcentury failed from its very begining.

Contemporaneity as a Paradise Lost

The imbalance between Venezuela’s appearance and its reality resulted in a complicated Janus-faced dilemma characterized by the opposition between progress and

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backwardness. Rather than embracing the official mirage, El Techo anchored its proposals

precisely within this dichotomy. For the collective, the sixties represented a Paradise lost

at the expense of development. Caupolicán Ovalles expressed the group’s understanding of contemporaneity eloquently:

Consider that mankind’s dominance was a paradise in the olden days; [it] was the laughter that man did not deserve;…; and in the olden days you lived…What does it mean [now] that you are not aware of God’s existence and that the city of the Lord is now enfolded by the smoke of a factory or perforated by an astronaut who is as lost as you are but whose lucidity is frightening?2

The dismal emptiness of this scenario mirrored similar realizations in other parts of the

developing world of the deceptive partiality of hastened technological and industrial

advancement. Moreover, the overwrought state of affairs that Ovalles described prompted

two modes of involvement: one as a passive spectator—death in life—the other as an active combatant in constant confrontation with the end of the illusion—the imminence of life in death. El Techo chose this second path.

A Contingent Milieu as the Whale

Dámaso Ogaz’s notion of lo majamámico justified the transformation of contemporaneity into an unconstrained vital space that the group often represented as the whale. The animal served as an analogy for the ungraspable as well as a schizoid Leviathan

2 “Piense que antaño fue un paraíso el dominio del hombre; antaño fue la risa del hombre que no se merecía; antaño usted, fue pastor o rey, tomó su vino y tuvo su mujer, fue a la guerra y murió de diversa manera; y antaño usted vivió…¿qué significa que uno sea el último hombre? ¿que uno camine su ciudad y ella le pertenezca en sus cuatro costados? Ahora, ¿qué significa que usted desconozca la existencia de Dios y que la ciudad del Señor esté envuelta en la niebla de una fábrica o atravesado por el ojo del astronauta tan perdido como usted, pero tan lúcido, que da miedo?” Ibid.

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of artistic action where, as in El Techo’s own practice, the dualities of good/evil and

life/death coexisted. In this context, the whale became the emblem for a contingent milieu

that—following Canguilhem’s notion—resulted from the absence of an intrinsic harmony

between the group and their Venezuelan environment. Ogaz wrote that the whale and lo

majamámico were more about active behavior than posture:

[Lo majamámico] takes a jab at those rational values that disturbed the surrealists. It defines the permanent succession of free states [of consciousness] and illegal actions as the only possible pathways in altering [entrenched] mental patterns and subverting a society where the individual—and in consequence also the group—is no longer a legitimate end.3

El Techo proposed the image of the whale as the activated space of its violent

confrontations. In this sense, its illicit actions sought to transform Venezuela from the inside-out as well as to generate new universal truths from within a fluid and indeterminate sea of external forces.

Fluidity as “the roof of the whale”

The kenning that produced El Techo de la Ballena’s name was a direct reference to the sea. Yet, in its first manifesto, the group declared: “el techo de la ballena is more than a name.”4 Indeed, El Techo established an equivalence between the sea and another

primordial matter, magma. Once transformed into its liquid state, “the boiling matter” of

3 “…más que una postura, [la ballena y lo majamámico es] una conducta. Golpea lo que, de racional, perturbó al surrealismo, y proclama la permanente sucesión de estados libres y la acción ilegal como la única vía para alterar los patrones mentales y subvertir una sociedad donde el individuo —y en consecuencia la colectividad— ha dejado de ser un fin válido. Aray, “La ballena ante:,” 204−205.

4 [Contramaestre], “the great magma (first manifesto),” 264.

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magma became one of several useful allegories for the group’s fluid aims.5 The sea’s most

violent alter ego, magma represented a dense, slow, and sluggish substance in constant

state of mutation as it folded and retreated into and out of the Earth’s deepest crevices.

These allegories, magma and the sea, also enjoined within them the image of the group’s

specific environment: the city of Caracas, which they often described through images of

its disturbing landscape. Together, these interchangeable moving parts—the sea, magma,

Caracas, among them—were indivisible components of an all-encompassing “everything:”

the idea of fluidity. This fundamental notion helped the group rationalize an alternative social order based on the chaotic, the organic, and the spontaneous:

What distinguished us from traditional Marxist political movements is that we were not enslaved by any dogmas. Rather, there was a profound freedom [among us] and we proclaimed this from our first aesthetic actions. When we began to create objects [or] sculptures [we did so] without any dogmas, or political, or aesthetic encumbrances. At stake was the understanding that there was a limitless [and] open road ahead of us. And that freedom [wa]s an unstoppable onrush…6

As Carlos Contramaestre stated, El Techo’s proposals did not exclude anything. No natural

or uncontrollable forces were off-limits in the crafting of its unfixed and free-flowing

paradigm. Moreover, the invocation of fluidity summarized perfectly the group’s desire

for constant evolution, investigation, and change. This open-ended strategy allowed the

group to reconcile the contradictions resulting from the balleneros’ simultaneous

5El Techo de la Ballena, “para la restitución del magma,” recto.

6 “Lo que realmente nos diferencia de los movimientos políticos tradicionales marxistas es que no había ningún dogma que nos aprisionara, sino que había una profunda libertada, y es esto lo que vamos a proclamar desde nuestras primeras actuaciones en el plano estético, cuando empezamos a crear objetos, a hacer esculturas sin ningún tipo de dogmas, ni ataduras políticas o estéticas. Se trataba de entender que había una camino por delante sin límite, abierto, y que la libertad es una arremetida indetenible e imparable.” Contramaestre in Díaz Orozco, El mediodía de la modernidad, 141.

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condemnation of Venezuela’s convulsive cultural and sociopolitical conflicts, their will to

collapse the frontiers of art and political engagement, and their overarching concern with

loosening up formal disciplinary distinctions in the visual arts.

Art as a Total Enterprise

El Techo’s artistic work should be understood as a comprehensive creative outpouring that extended beyond the limits of art. It was a social practice that confronted an eroded Venezuelan environment through multidisciplinary components that included the visual, the poetic, the literary, the performative, and the political. This total output responded to the collective’s goal of shocking and unsettling the public through humor and provocation. The balleneros’ comprehensive position on art contrasted with ideals on the

Synthesis of the Arts that operated nationally, which in its overarching will to modernize the country, encapsulated within it a welfare state notion of public space as well as ideologies of free enterprise and functionalism. Indeed, El Techo’s colossal bricolages of multidisciplinary components without hierarchy contrasted greatly with the top-down nature of the urban planning and architectural projects that Carlos Raul Villanueva and others erected in Caracas under the prerogative of the Synthesis of the Arts.

In Homenaje a la necrofilia, El Techo intertwined allegories for corporeal putrefaction and physical dissolution with a vital sexual force. Here the controversial premise was that Contramaestre’s decomposing assemblages could embody the pestilence and decay that characterized the Venezuelan contemporary social fabric. But the counterintuitive drives of sex, from which life emerged, and death, where it ended, that animated his necrophiliac series also reminded all of the impossibility of containing the

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collective’s ambitious project within specific parameters. Certainly, it was at such

contradictory moments as this point of union between libidinal pleasure and death where

the group not only fulfilled its ambitious project, but also where it failed. As Edmundo

Aray stated, at stake was the notion that man could literally deplete “his own existence

through the poetic act, madness, humor, provocation, and drunkenness.”7 Only when

armed with such knowledge can we begin to grasp the sweeping demands of El Techo de

la Ballena’s practice, which were so aptly summarized by its operative slogan to change

life, to transform society.

7 “Se trataba fundamentalmente de consumir la vida en el propio acto de la creación. Concepción que luego va a ser parte de El Techo de la Ballena; de devorar la existencia en el hecho poético, la locura, en el humor, en la provocación, en la ebriedad.” Aray in Tapias and Suazo, “Edmundo Aray,” 123.

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APPENDIX A – FIGURES

Figs. 1.1 a-d. Stills from Pozo muerto, a documentary film by Edmundo Aray, Antonio de la Rosa, and Carlos Rebolledo (38min., Fundación Cinemateca Nacional, 1967).

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Fig. 1.2. Lawrence Beall Smith (b. 1909), Don’t let that shadow touch them: buy war bonds, 1942. Poster; 51 x 36 cm. United States. Department of the Treasury; U.S. G.P.O. World War II Poster Collection at Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois.

Figs. 1.3a-b. On the left, Dr. Gonzalo Cárdenas Farías, head of Venezuela’s Instituto Nacional de Ferrocarriles, announces a grid of planned railroad lines to connect the country, c. 1951. Plans were discontinued with the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. On the right, Juscelino Kubitschek (1902−76), president of Brazil from 1956 to 1960, does the same for a grid of roads and highways that would radiate from the new capital city of Brasília to connect the country. Illustration from Revista Manchete, São Paulo, 1956.

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Fig. 1.4. John F. Kennedy delivering a speech at La Morita, Venezuela, during an official meeting for the Alliance for Progress in 1961. On the left of the banner is an image of Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt.

Fig. 1.5. Map of Creole Petroleum oil camps which appeared in Creole Petroleum Corporation’s guidebook Working with Creole in Venezuela (1956).

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Fig. 1.6. Daniel González (b. 1934), “Una disyuntiva: la gastronomía o el hambre.” Photograph published by El Techo de la Ballena and Editorial La Muralla as one of the postcards in the collection Tema navideño/la carlota/caracas, c. 1967. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 43, box 27).

Fig. 1.7. Aerial photography of Plaza Venezuela c. 1951. Collection of Cartografía Nacional, Venezuela. Reproduced in Niño Araque et al., 1950. El espíritu moderno, 58.

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Fig. 1.8. Paolo Gasparini (Venezuelan, born Italy 1934), Bello Monte, Caracas, 1968. Gelatin silver print, 16 x 24.5 cm. Coll. The Museum of Modern Art, Latin American and Caribbean Fund through gift of Adriana Cisneros de Griffin. © 2015 Paolo Gasparini.

Figs. 1.9 a-d. Jorge Romero Gutierrez, Pedro Neuberger, and Dirk Bornhorst, architects. Model (top left), construction (top right), completed project (bottom left), and dome (bottom right) of the Helicoide at Roca Tarpeya, Caracas (begun 1956−1961, completed 1965−67).

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Figs. 1.10 a-d. Oscar Niemeyer (1907−2012), Plan for the unrealized Museo de Arte Moderno de Caracas (MAMC), proposed for a hilltop in the Colinas de Bello Monte sector, 1955. Early concept sketch (a), scaled models (b and c), and cross section (d).

Figs. 1.11 a-d. Giὸ Ponti (1891−1979), Villa Planchart (Residence for Anala and Armando Planchart), 1953−57. Exterior shot of the entry wing with its large cantilever and outdoor car park (top left), open staircase as seen from the living room (top right), the residence’s natural environment (bottom left), and the home’s façade looking towards Caracas (bottom right).

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Fig. 1.12. Lanthrop Douglass (c. 1908−81), Creole Petroleum building, 1947−54. Urb. Los Chaguaramos, Caracas.

Figs. 1.13 a-b. British Pathé News, stills from “Venezuela’s City of Tomorrow,” 1954 (left) and “Venezuela’s ‘Utopia’ City,” December 1954 [film 494.04] (right).

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Fig. 1.14. Carlos Raúl Villanueva (1900−75), Urbanización 23 de Enero, 1954−57. Aerial photograph by Paolo Gasparini. Coll. Fundaciόn Museo de Arquitectura, Caracas. Reproduced in Niño Araque et al., 1950. El espíritu moderno, 63.

Fig. 1.15. Cover for The New El Dorado. Venezuela, by Edward Ward, 7th Viscount Bangor, (London: Robert Hale, 1957).

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Fig. 1.16. Daniel González, photograph from Asfalto-Infierno, a 1963 collaboration with Adriano González-León. Scene shows the informal structures of the Caracas slums, or ranchitos.

Fig. 1.17. Alejandro Otero (1921−90), Cafetera Azul (First version), 1947. Oil/canvas; 64.5cm x 53.7 cm. Coll. Fundación Museos Nacionales/Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.

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Fig. 1.18. Pascual Navarro (1923−86), La muchacha de abanico, 1947. Guache and paper over canvas; 160x115.5 cm. Coll. Consejo Nacional de la Cultura, Caracas.

Fig. 1.19. Jesús Rafael Soto (1923−2005), Boîte, 1955−64 (multiples). Mixed media; 32x31.7x15.7cm.

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Fig. 1.20. Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1923), Construcción en el espacio, 1957. Casein (Plaka) on canvas; 38 x 38 in. Coll. Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.

Fig. 1.21. A woman manipulates the catalogue that Carlos Cruz-Diez designed for the exhibition Mouvement 2 held at Galerie Denise René in 1964. Photo by André Morain.

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Figs. 1.22 a-b. Catalogue for The Responsive Eye and installation view of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965. Coll. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Figs. 1.23 a-c. Carlos Raúl Villanueva, redevelopment of El Silencio (1943−45). Three historical views: the Plaza O’Leary, detail of “Las Toninas” fountain by Francisco Narváez (top left); the Pasarela Avenida Bolívar (top right); and the landmark Torres del Centro Simón Bolívar (TCSB, also known as Torres de El Silencio), 1948−54 (bottom).

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Fig. 1.24. Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Aerial view of the Ciudad Universitaria’s central axis. Archivo Fundación Villanueva, Caracas [Image F02481].

Fig. 1.25. Francisco Narváez (1905−82), La educación [Education], 1950. Cumarebo Stone; h.: 195cm, w.: 207cm. Instituto de Medicina Experimental, Ciudad Universitaria. Photo by Robustiano Gorgal.

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Figs. 1.26 a-b. Two examples of Villanueva’s use of reinforced concrete at the Ciudad Universtaria: the Access ramp leading up to the balcony of the Aula Magna (left) and the Plaza Cubierta (right). Photographs by Paolo Gasparini, Coll. Fundación Museo de Arquitectura, Caracas.

Fig. 1.27. Mateo Manaure (b. 1926), Mural on the exterior of the covered plaza at the Ciudad Universitaria with Villanueva’s Biblioteca Central in the background.

Fig. 1.28. Alejandro Otero, decoration of the School of Engineering, UCV, Ciudad Universitaria, Caracas.

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Fig. 1.29. Alexander Calder (1898−1976), Acoustic Clouds for the Aula Magna, Ciudad Universitaria, Caracas, 1952−53. Photo by Paolo Gasparini. Archivo Fundación Villanueva, Caracas [Image F02481].

Fig. 1.30. Francisco Narváez, El Atleta [The Athlete], 1952. Prefabricated concrete. Estadio Olímpico, Ciudad Universitaria.

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Fig. 2.1. Cover for the catalogue for Cubism and Abstract Art, an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 under the direction of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

Fig. 2.2. Jean Fautrier (1898−1964), Tête d’otage [Head of a Hostage], 1944.

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Fig. 2.3. Manuel Viola (1916−87), Sierra Maestra, 1959. Oil on canvas, 200 x 150cm. Coll. Fundación Juan March, Madrid. In Tusell, El Paso, 106.

Fig. 2.4. Cover for the catalogue for Espacios Vivientes, held at the Palacio Municipal in Maracaibo, February 14−28, 1960. Coll. CINAP/Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas. Courtesy of Roldán Esteva Grillet.

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Fig. 2.5. Ángel Luque (b. 1927), Untitled, 1962. Ink on board, 57 x 56.2cm. Colección Banco Mercantil, Caracas [Object 1630]. Courtesy of Banco Mercantil.

Fig. 2.6. Gabriel Morera (b. 1933), Untitled (Cabezas [Heads] Series), 1961. Mixed media on canvas, 35.2 x 24.2cm. Colección Mercantil, Caracas [Object 1694]. Courtesy of Banco Mercantil.

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Fig. 2.7. Jean Dubuffet (1901−85), La Volonté de Puissance [The Will to Power], January 1946. Oil with pebbles, sand, glass, and rope on canvas, 116.2 x 88.9cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 74.2076 © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Fig. 2.8. Juan Calzadilla (b. 1931), Crónica de Caracas con cráneos de la Digepol [Chronicle from Caracas with skulls of the DIGEPOL], 1965. Ink on paper, 26.4 x 17.7cm. Colección Mercantil, Caracas [Object 2075]. Courtesy of Banco Mercantil.

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Fig. 2.9. Cover for the catalogue to Salón Experimental, held at the Sala de Exposiciones of the Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, Caracas, September 18−October 2, 1960. Coll. CINAP/Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas. Courtesy of Roldán Esteva Grillet.

Fig. 2.10. Sketch for the invitation to El Paso’s group show at the Institución Fernando El Católico, Palacio Provincial, Zaragoza, January 20−February 20, 1958. In Tudelilla, El Paso a la moderna intensidad, 25.

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Fig. 2.11. Rafael Canogar (b. 1935), Untitled, ca. 1961. Ink on paper, 62 x 45cm. Galería Alfonso XIII, Madrid. In Centro Cultural Puerta Real Caja Granada, El Paso. Arte y compromsio, 44.

Fig. 2.12. Manuel Rivera (1927−95), Variaciones sobre un gris [Variations in Gray], 1958. Metallic mesh and wire on wooden support, 111 x 76cm. Coll. Galería Rafael Ortiz, Seville. In Tudelilla, El Paso a la moderna intensidad, 201.

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Fig. 2.13. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746−1828), Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819–23. Oil mural transferred to canvas, 143 x 81cm. Coll. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

Fig. 2.14. José Gutiérrez Solana (1886−1945), La procesión de la muerte [The Death Procession], 1930. Oil on canvas, 210 x 123 cm. Coll. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.

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Fig. 2.15. Daniel González, photograph of the installation of Para la restitución del magma, which opened on March 21, 1961 at the Galería El Techo de la Ballena, El Conde, Caracas. His Totem neolítico is on the forefront. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 94, box 26).

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Figs. 2.16 a-b. El Techo de la Ballena, rayado sobre el techo de la ballena. Letras. Humor. Pintura (Caracas) 1 (March 24, 1961) and detail of the checklist for Para la restitución del magma. Graphic design by Ángel Luque.

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Fig. 2.17. Fernando Irazábal (b. 1936), El occiso, c. 1960. Mixed media on wood. Colección Mercantil, Caracas [object 2266]. Courtesy of Banco Mercantil.

Fig. 2.18. Fernando Irazábal, El occiso, circa 1960. Mixed media on wood. Collection and whereabouts unknown. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 121, box 31).

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Fig. 2.19. Catalogue for Irazábal’s exhibition Bestias, occisos, held at the Sala de Exposiciones Fudanción Eugenio Mendoza, March 30−April 15, 1962. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 7, box 19).

Fig. 2.20. Clipping and detail of the anonymous article, “Nuevos Cuadros Llevarán para Inuagurar esta Noche Galería de Informalistas,” published by La Esfera on March 24, 1961. The accompanying photograph shows several of the group’s members mounting the new pieces to replace the “stolen: works. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 130, box 23).

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Fig. 3.1 a-b. Illustrations for Adriano González León’s “¿Por que la ballena?” (left) and Caupolicán Ovalles’ “Contraseñas” (right), both in rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964): pages 2 and 28, respectively. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 22, box 3).

Fig. 3.2. Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch (1525−71), Sea-monsters and strange animals that in the Midnight Lands are found in the sea and on land, print of a woodcut from 1550 used in a later edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia universalis, first edition 1544. This color version comes from a seventeenth-century German edition of Cosmographia.

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Fig. 3.3. Anonymous woodcut, Whale eating men, from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia universalis, first edition 1544. Coll. CCI Archives/Science Photo Library.

Fig. 3.4 a-b: On the left, “El mordisco de la ballena,” detail from rayado sobre el techo no. 2 (May 1963) and, on the right, recto of En uso de razón by Caupolicán Ovalles, graphic design by Edmundo Aray and Rodolfo Izaguirre.

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Fig. 3.5. Wolfgang Kilian, St. Brendan’s whale, engraving for Honorius Philiponus’ Novi Orbis Indiae Occidentalis, 1621.

Fig. 3.6. Invitation for the exhibition Exposición tubular in honor of Caupolicán Ovalles, held in July 1963 at the Galería-Librería Ulises in the Sabana Grande district of Caracas. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 19, box 32).

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Fig. 3.7: Page from Salve, Amigo Salve, y Adiós, July 1968. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 57, box 17).

Fig. 3.8. Dámaso Ogaz, Esquema majamámico de uso profiláctico, published in El Techo’s postcard series from 1967. Coll. of Daniel González, Caracas.

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Fig. 3.9. Rodolfo Izaguirre receiving Ángel Luque’s original drawing for the first rayado sobre el techo, c. 1961. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 112, box 26).

Figs. 3.10 a-b. Daniél González, cover and back cover design for Caupolicán Ovalles’ ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente?, May 1962. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 8, box 4).

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Figs. 3.11a-b. Daniél González, cover and back matter design for Juan Calzadilla’s Dictado por la jauría, October 1962. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 9, box 22).

Fig. 3.12. Daniel González, covers for Francisco Pérez Perdomo’s Los Venenos Fieles, 1963; Daniel González and Adriano González León, Asfalto/Infierno, January 1963; and Edmundo Aray, Sube para Bajar, 1963. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (objects 20, 12, and 21; box 24).

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Fig. 3.13. Pages six and seven of ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? with the Infernal punishment for the Seven Deadly Sins: the lustful are smothered in fire and brimstone from Le grant kalendrier des Bergiers (printed by Nicolas le Rouge, Troyes, 1496) on the right.

Fig. 3.14. Konrad Gerner, Fischbuch: Der zwölfte theil von de Meertheire, 1598 or earlier, folio 97r.

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Fig. 3.15. Detail from Olaus Magnus (1490−1557), Carta Marina, 1539. Detail of Woodblock D: Western Islands showing the nursing whale below the island of Thule (Tile on the map).

Fig. 3.16. Four examples from the Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena series: (top left) Los métodos y las desrciones imaginarias, 1963; (top right) Juan Calzadilla, Malos modales, September 1965; (bottom left) Ezequiel Saad, Hablar con propiedad, March 1968; and (bottom right) Edmundo Aray, Efraín Hurtado, Juan Calzadilla, Dámaso Ogaz, et al., Salve, Amigo Salve, y Adiós, July 1968. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (objects 54, 26, 56, and 57, box 17).

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Figs. 3.17 a-b. Two interior details from Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los venenos fieles (1963) showing same motif. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 20, box 24).

Fig. 3.18 a-b. Poster/catalogue for Alberto Brandt’s Falsarios eróticos, held at the Galería El Puente from October 20 to November 10, 1966, and detail of logo. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 27, box 20).

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Fig. 3.19. Installation view of Tubulares, an exhibtion in honor of Caupolicán Ovalles, held in 1963 at the Galería-Librería Ulises in the Sabana Grande district of Caracas. On the wall several copies of the foldout poster En uso de razón by Ovalles. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 113, box 29).

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Figs. 3.20 a-b. Santiago “Chago” Armada (1937−95), top image: ¡Ay!, cartoon published in El Techo’s postcard series from 1967. Coll. of Daniel González, Caracas. Bottom: Salomón, comic strip published in El humor otro (Havana: Ediciones Revolución, 1963). Coll. of Gerardo Mosquera, Havana.

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Fig. 4.1. Entrance to El Techo de la Ballena’s gallery at El Conde (Este 12, no. 240), during the show Homenaje a la cursilería, which opened May 7, 1961. Gonzalo Castellanos and an unidentified Lolita He[illegible] are to the left of the entrance. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 100, box 29).

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Fig. 4.2. Sofía [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena. Homenaje a lo cursi,” Páginas (Caracas) (May 21, 1961): 16. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 134, box 16).

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Fig. 4.3. Attributed to Alberto Brandt, [Establecer una frontera entre lo cursi y lo pavoso...], typed manuscript handed out during the opening of Homenaje a la cursilería, c. May 1961. Colección Sagrario Berti, Caracas. ICAA Digital Archive no. 1059586.

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Fig. 4.4. Campaign poster for Rómulo Betancourt, c. 1958.

Fig. 4.5. Rafael Caldera, Jóvito Villalba (1908−89) of the Unión Republicana Democrática (URD), and Rómulo Betancourt after accepting the 1958 Punto Fijo Pact.

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Fig. 4.6. Manuel Cabré (1890−1984), La silla de Caracas, 1951. Private Collection, Caracas. Image from Alfredo Boulton, Manuel Cabré, 1989.

Fig. 4.7. Pedro Centeno Vallenilla (1904−88), María Lionza y las tres razas en la Fuente, date unknown.

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Fig. 4.8. Luis Alfredo López Méndez (1901−96), Flores, 1947. Oil on canvas; 90 x 54 cm. Coll. unknown.

Fig. 4.9. Feler Voalois, installation shot of Homenaje a la cursilería, May 1962. In [Imber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena,” 17.

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Fig. 4.10. Feler Voalois, installation shot of Homenaje a la cursilería, May 1962. In [Imber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena,” 16.

Fig. 4.11. Cover for the satirical magazine El Gallo Pelón, April 18, 1961. Caricature is by Humberto Muñoz.

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Fig. 4.12. Ana Griselda Vegas Albornoz, Miss Venezuela 1961.

Fig. 4.13. Cartilla cívica popular, issued by the Ministry of Education in the early sixties.

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Figs. 4.14 a-c. From left to right: Irene Delano (1919−82), Peligro [Danger], c. 1946; Robert Gwathmey (1903−88), Por mandato del pueblo. Los trabajadores que viven de la tierra deben participar de los beneficios de la tierra, 1947; and Edwin Rosskam (1903– 1985), El voto es la Herramienta con que Hacemos Nuestro Gobierno, 1948. Silkscreen posters produced by the Division of Film and Graphics within the Commission of Parks and Recreation in Puerto Rico.

Figs. 4.15 a-b. On the left, Fritz Melbye (1826−96), Retrato del general José Antonio Páez, c. 1850s, engraving, in Boulton, Camille Pissarro en Venezuela. On the right, Eloy Palacios (1847−1919), “Venezuelan Joropo,” 1912. In Atlas de Tradiciones de Venezuela, 1998.

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Fig. 4.16. [Vaya al Techo de la Ballena], photograph of Rodolfo Izaguirre (with mask), Edmundo Aray, and Carlos Contramaestre promoting Homenaje a la cursilería at Galería El Techo de la Ballena, El Conde, May 1961. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 91, framed photograph).

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Fig. 4.17. Feler Voalois, installation shot of Homenaje a la cursilería, May 1962. In [Ímber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena,” 17.

Fig. 4.18. Emiel van Moerkerken (1916−95), view of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, January 17−February 24, 1938, Galérie Beaux-Arts (140, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris).

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Fig. 4.19. Alfredo Boulton residence at Pampatar, Margarita. Furniture design by Miguel Otero, a Colorritmo by Alejandro Otero is on the back wall, and the mobile is by Alexander Calder.

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Fig. 4.20. Feler Voalois, detail showing netting used by El Techo during Homenaje a la cursilería, May 1962. In [Imber] Meneses, “en el Techo de la Ballena,” 17.

Fig. 4.21. John D. Schiff, Installation of First Papers of Surrealism (South view), showing Marcel Duchamp’s His twine, 1942. Opened on October 14, 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan. Gelatin silver print. Coll. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of their mother Alexina Duchamp.

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Figs. 4.22 a-b. Top: general view of This is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery (London), August 9−September 9, 1956. Bottom: detail of installation by Group 12 (Lawrence Alloway, Geoffrey Holroyd, and Tony Del Renzio).

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Fig. 4.23. John McHale (1922−78), Machine-Made America II, collage, 1956.

Fig. 4.24. Daniel González, untitled collage from the exhibition Daniel González Collages, at the Maracaibo gallery of 40 Grados a la Sombra, January 31 to February 16, 1964.

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Figs. 5.1 a-c. Daniel González, photographs from Asfalto-Infierno (1963): 19, 17, and 21. The sign on the façade reads: “Se aplican inyecciones y sueros. Se preparan cadaveres. TELF. −2370.”

Fig. 5.2. Daniel González, “Terreno propio,” photograph from Asfalto-Infierno (1963): 27.

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Fig. 5.3. Daniel González, “Se venden vestidos para difuntas,” photograph from Asfalto- Infierno (1963): 25.

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Figs. 5.4 a-c. Three exterior views of the opening for Homenaje a la necrofilia, November 2, 1962. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (objects 103, 104 and 106 [?], box 29).

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Figs. 5.5 a-c. Three installation views of Homenaje a la necrofilia during opening night (November 2, 1962). Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (objects 107, 108 and 109 [?], box 29).

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Fig. 5.6. Carlos Contramaestre, Estudio para verdugo y perro, 1962. Mixed media on Masonite; 120 x 112 cm. Private Collection, Caracas.

Fig. 5.7. Manolo Millares (1926–72), Homúnculo, 1960. Watercolor, gouache, ink, and graphite on canvas (sackcloth); 162.5 x 131 cm. Coll. Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona.

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Fig. 5.8. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606−69), The Slaughtered Ox, 1655. Oil on wood; 94 x 69 cm. Coll. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Fig. 5.9. Francis Bacon (1909−92), Figure with Meat, 1954. Oil on canvas; 129.9 x 121.9cm. Coll. Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 5.10. Carlos Alonso (b. 1929), Carne de primera [First-rate meat], 1977.

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Fig. 5.11. Daniel González, design for catalogue of Carlos Contramaestre’s Homenaje a la necrofilia, which opened on November 2, 1962. ICAA Digital Archive no. 1097543.

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Fig. 5.12. Jan Wandelaar (1690–1759), Human Skeleton with Young Rhinoceros, from the Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani [Tables of Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body] by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus (Leiden: 1747).

Fig. 5.13. Ligier Richier (c. 1500–1567), Transi de René de Châlon, Church of Saint- Étienne, Bar-le-Duc, France, 1547.

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Fig. 5.14. Daniel González, photograph of Carlos Contramaestre’s Flora cadavérica from the Homenaje a la necrofilia series, 1962. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 102, box 29).

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Fig. 5.15. Daniel González, photograph “[Carlos Contramaestre]: El artista en su taller,” 1962. Coll. MoMA, ETdlB/Oberto (object 101, box 29).

Fig. 5.16. Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Oil on canvas; 216.5 x 169.5cm. Coll. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

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Fig. 5.17. Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente [aka Hieronymous Fabricius] (1533–c. 1619), panel from Tabulae Pictae, first published in 1600: Rari 112.10, side view of the brain raised from the base of the cranium; below a posterior view of the brainstem and cerebellum.

Fig. 5.18. Carlos Contramaestre, Tres años más tarde, c. 1962. Published in rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964): 18.

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Fig. 5.19. Detail from catalogue for Homenaje a la necrofilia, verso.

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APPENDIX B – BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

INNER CIRCLE

ARAY, Edmundo (b. Maracay, Edo. Aragua, Venezuela, 1936) Writer and filmmaker

From the mid-fifties onward, Aray was part of a left-leaning intellectual class that sought to renew Venezuelan cultural life through a transgressive aesthetic. Following the defeat of Marcos Pérez Jiménez on Janaury 23, 1958, Aray helped to establish the literary group Sardio (1958−61) and its homologous journal. His work from this period, including Nadie quiere descansar (Caracas: Ediciones Sardio, 1961), injected Universalist and mythical undertones to what he and his Sardio colleagues considered to be washed out Venezuelan cultural values. Political and aesthetic differences between the less radical members of the group—who nominally aligned themselves with the international Social Democracy movement represented in Venezuela by the Acción Democrática Party (AD, or Adeco)— and its more radical subscribers—such as Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Salvador Garmendia, and Francisco Pérez Perdomo—resulted in Sardio’s disintegration early in the sixties. Fueled by their Leftist politics, this radicalized faction sought to definitively transform Venezuela’s entrenched traditional political and cultural values from the platform of El Techo de la Ballena, which they established in 1961. Involvement in El Techo radicalized Aray’s intellectual production as it became increasingly more ideologically charged. Aray was one of the constant figures in El Techo de la Ballena and he, along with Carlos Contramaestre and Juan Calzadilla, prolonged the group’s activities from its 1968 farewell publication of Salve Amigo, Salve y Adiós until its definitive disintegration in 1969.

El Techo Publications Aray. [Anthology: minimodrama]. Twist presidencial: todo está en regla (Caracas: Ediciones Tubulares 2 de El Techo de la Ballena, August 1963). Aray. [Short Story]. Sube para Bajar (Caracas: ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, December 1963). Aray, Jorge Camacho, André Breton, and Xavier Domingo. [Short Story]. Historia del Ojo (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, June 1965). Aray, Carlos Rebolledo and Antonio de la Rosa. [Script]. Pozo Muerto (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, documental 30, January 1967). Aray. [Prologue to Dámaso Ogaz’s essay]. “La ballena ante:,” La Ballena y lo Majamámico (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, Colección Docencia Ballenera no. 2, November 1967).

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Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Perán Ermini, and Roberto Fernández Retamar. [Exhibition catalogue]. [Umberto Peña:] Litografías (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, August 1967). Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Xavier Domingo, Efraín Hurtado, Marcia Leyseca, Dámaso Ogaz, Tancredo Romero. [Anthology]. Salve Amigo, Salve y Adiós (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, July 1968).

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with Jacobo Borges, Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Fernando Irazábal and Mary Ferrero], Exposición tubular (Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles) (Caracas: July 1963).

Other El Techo Activities [Roundtable]. La Intervención Cultural en América Latina, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ángel Rama, Siné, José Miguel Oviedo, Basilia Papastamatiu, Eleazar Díaz Rangel, Adriano González León, Edmundo Aray, August 1967.

CALZADILLA, Juan (b. Altagracia de Orituco, Edo. Guárico, Venezuela, 1931) Writer, painter, journalist, and art critic [Also known as Esteban Muro, Moisés Ottop, and Juan de la Jauría]

Juan Calzadilla studied letters and philosophy at the UCV (Caracas) and at the Instituto Pedagógico Nacional. He first erupted unto the Venezuelan literary scene with poetic anthologies such as Primeros poemas (1954) and Los herbarios rojos (Caracas, 1958). Soon after these publications, Calzadilla gained prominence as a journalist, artist, and art critic. Calzadilla organized the hallmark salons of Espacios Vivientes in Maracaibo (February 14−28, 1960) and Salón Experimental in Caracas (Sala Mendoza, September 18−October 2, 1960)—as well as their subsequent iterations in the Venezuelan cities of Trujillo and Barcelona—that helped launch Informalism in the country. He was a founding member of Sardio and, in 1961 became a constitutive member of El Techo [see Aray]. From from 1960 to 1962, Calzadilla directed the Revista Visual, the organ of the Museo de Bellas Artes. The literary works that he published with El Techo reflects an aversion towards Venezuela’s rapidly developing urban centers, a theme developed by many of his contemporaries. Yet Calzadilla distinguished himself through a vehement interest in dissolving the subject, creating a more stripped-down language, as well as participating in his own narratives. As an artist, he had his first solo show in 1962 at the Galería-Librería Ulises in Caracas which featured drawings influenced by Near Eastern calligraphy and automatism. Along with Carlos Contramaestre, he is considered El Techo’s chief ideologue. As an art critic, Calzadilla published Pintores venezolanos, the first anthology of his art criticism, in 1963 and a similar compilation, El arte en Venezuela, in 1967. He was an unconditional member of El Techo, participating in its activities until its definitive disintegration in 1969.

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El Techo Publications Calzadilla. [Fiction]. Dictado por la Jauría (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1962). Calzadilla. [Essay]. “La terrible prueba,” Rayado sobre el techo (Caracas) no. 3, August 1964. Calzadilla. Malos Modales (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, November 1965). Calzadilla, Antonio Moya, and Juan Calzadilla. [Manifesto]. Notario de Muerte (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, August 1966). Calzadilla and Carlos Contramaestre. [Exhibition catalogue]. [Carlos Contramaestre:] Los tumorales (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1967). Calzadilla, Edmundo Aray, Perán Ermini, and Roberto Fernández Retamar. [Exhibition catalogue]. [Umberto Peña:] Litografías (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, August 1967). Calzadilla. [Poetic Anthology]. Las Contradicciones sobrenaturales (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, September 1967). Calzadilla, Edmundo Aray, Carlos Contramaestre, Xavier Domingo, Efraín Hurtado, Marcia Leyseca, Dámaso Ogaz, Tancredo Romero. [Anthology]. Salve Amigos, Salve y Adiós (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, July 1968). Calzadilla. [Literary criticism]. “Las premisas de un método antipoético,” essay on Dámaso Ogaz’s Los métodos y las deserciones imaginarias (Caracas, 1968). Calzadilla. Ciudadano sin fin (Caracas, 1969).

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with Carlos Contramaestre, Pedro Briceño, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del magma (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Solo Exhibition. Dibujos Coloidales (Caracas: Librería Ulises, March 8, 1963). Group Exhibition [with Jacobo Borges, Carlos Contramaestre, Fernando Irazábal, Edmundo Aray and Mary Ferrero], Exposición tubular (Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles) (Caracas: July 1963). Group Exhibition [with Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del Magma (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la

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ballena (Caracas: Galería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965). Group Exhibition [with: Antonio Moya and Juan Calzadilla]. Notario de Muerte (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, August 1966). Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Baptista, Brandt, Contramaestre, Camacho, Erminy, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Ogaz, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, Q. Castillo, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles (Caracas: Galería- Librería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], October 21, 1967).

CONTRAMAESTRE, Carlos (b. Tovar, Edo. Mérida, Venezuela, 1933−1996) Writer, painter, and medical doctor [Also known as El Gran Magma]

Contramaestre cultivated his artistic pursuits early during his medical training at the Universidad de los Andes in the city of Mérida. In 1951 he exhibited alongside Salvador Valero, Marchos Miliana and Renzo Vestrini at the Asociación Venezolana de Periodistas (AVP) in the Andean city of Valera where, as a youth, he had met fellow ballenero Adriano González León. In 1954, while still a student, Contramaesrte participated in a group show at the university’s law school in salute of the establishment of the Taller Libre de Arte in Mérida, a group that he had held to establish two years prior. Upon completing his fourth year of medical school in 1954, Contramaestre went to Caracas and befriended a group of intellectuals who would go on to establish Sardio: Salvador Garmendia, Ramón Palomares, and Rodolfo Izaguirre. In 1956, he enrolled at the medical school of the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain, where he remained for five years. In Spain, Contramaestre studied Goya’s Black Paintings (c. 1819−23) and the work of Old Master Juan de Valdés Leal (1622−90). More importantly, perhaps, he met some of the members of Madrid’s Grupo El Paso (1957−60) established by, among others, the painters Rafael Canogar (b. 1935), Luis Feito (b. 1929), and Antonio Saura (1930−98), the sculptor Pablo Serrano (1908−85)—who had emigrated to Argentina in 1929 and spent over 25 years between Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay—, and the art critics José Ayllón and Manolo Conde. The Spanish collective coalesced at a time when the production of the dominant artistic circles of their time did not adequately reflect the real and historical conditions of the country. El Paso’s aggressive methods, position of rupture, and critical stance were important referents for Contramaestre’s future work in Venezuela. In 1960 he sent two of his paintings—Chatarra and Muro y fábula—to the Salón Experimental held in Caracas’ Sala Mendoza which, along with the Espacios Vivientes Salon (Palacio Municipal, Maracaibo, also in 1960), galvanized Informalism in Venezuela. Contramaestre returned to Venezuela in 1961 to develop both of his parallel occupations; he joined the avant-garde group Sardio while working fulltime for the Ministry of Health as a rural doctor in the state of Mérida. In 1962, backlash from his controversial Homenaje a la necrofilia (November) led to the seizure and disposal of all but two or three of the exhibited works and, ultimately, led to his destitution from his official post as a state doctor. The following year,

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Contramaestre opened a private medical practice in Cabimas (Zulia State) that he kept until 1968, when fellow painter Oswaldo Vigas—at the time director of cultural initiatives at his alma matter—hired him to head the Centro Experimental de Arte at the university. At the height of his activities with El Techo, Contramaestre received important distinctions as an artist including the Premio Ateneo de Caracas, Cuarta exposición nacional de dibujo y grabado (Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, UCV, 1962) and the Premio Emil Friedman (top prize for drawings) during the XXVII Salón Oficial (1966). The artist and medical doctor remained active as a ballenero until the group’s demise.

El Techo Publications Contramaestre and Adriano González León, Alfred Jarry et al. [Exhibition catalogue]. Homenaje a la necrofilia (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, November 1962). Contramaestre (illustrations) and Dámaso Ogaz. Espada de doble filo (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, Colección Sir Walter Raleigh, August 1962). Contramaestre. [Essay]. “Alberto Brandt, el gran farsante,” Rayado sobre el Techo no. 2 (May 1963). Contramaestre and Juan Calzadilla. [Exhibition catalogue]. [Carlos Contramaestre:] Los tumorales (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1965). Contramaestre. [Essay]. “Reo de la putrefacción – Viaje Cenestésico,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). Contramaestre, Edmundo Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Xavier Domingo, Efraín Hurtado, Marcia Leyseca, Dámaso Ogaz, Tancredo Romero. [Anthology]. Salve Amigos, Salve y Adiós (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, July 1968). Contramaestre. [Monograph]. Armando Reverón. El Hombre Mono (Mérida, Venezuela: Euroamérica Impresores/ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, colección EL MACROCEFALO, December 1969).

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla, Pedro Briceño, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del magma (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Group Exhibition [with: Jacobo Borges, Fernando Irazábal, Juan Calzadillla, Edmundo Aray and Mary Ferrero], Exposición tubular (Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles) (Caracas: July 1963). Solo Exhibition. Homenaje a la necrofilia (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, November 2, 1962). Solo Exhibition. Los tumorales (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, 1965). Solo Exhibition. Los tumorales (Maracaibo: Galería 40 Grados a la Sombra, February 5−19, 1965).

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Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena (Caracas: Galería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965). Solo Exhibition. Los Confinamientos (Caracas: Galería El Puente, July 29, 1967). Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Baptista, Brandt, Calzadilla, Camacho, Erminy, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Ogaz, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, Q. Castillo, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles (Caracas: Galería-Librería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], October 21, 1967).

GARMENDIA [Graterón], Salvador (Barquisimeto, Edo. Lara, Venezuela, 1928−2001) Writer, television and radio scriptwriter

Garmendia contracted tuberculosis at an early age which left him bedridden for three years and unable to attend school. Largely self-taught, he published his first novel, El parquet (edited by Casta J. Riera) in 1940 at age twelve. By age twenty, Garmendia had joined the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) and published the journal Tiempo literario in Barquisimeto along with a group of local writers including Alberto Anzola, Elio Mujica, and Carmen Lucía Tamayo de Sequera. The writer moved to Caracas in 1948 where, the following year, he was able to secure work as a radio announcer—an occupation that he held until 1967. During this period he adapted, and often also read, such international best sellers as Crime and Punishment for Venezuelan radio audiences. Garmendia joined Sardio in 1958, the same year that he wrote the radio serial Marcela Campos, la guerrillera de los Llanos which, in a cryptic language kept listeners abreast not only of what was happening in Caracas’s political, social and economic scenes but, more importantly, of an incipient guerilla movement in the countryside. That year, he also published his first novel, Los pequeños seres: el laberinto de lo humano (Caracas, 1958), which underscored the author’s connection to the gray and alienated existence of urban dwellers. Upon Sardio’s dissolution, Garmendia went on to establish El Techo in 1961 [see Aray]. In the sixties, the writer published novels including Los habitantes (1961), Días de ceniza (1963), Doble Fondo (1964), and La mala vida (1968).

El Techo Publications Garmendia. [Essay]. “Maniquíes,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964).

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GONZÁLEZ LEÓN, Adriano (Valera, Edo. Trujillo, Venezuela, 1931−2008) Writer and poet

At the age of fifteen, González León was employed as the Andean correspondent for the Caracas-based El Nacional in his native state of Trujillo. He went on to study law at the UCV (Caracas), where—upon graduation in 1955—he also taught literature. In the fifties, González León fought against the Pérez Jiménez regime and expressed his political dissent through collaborations with the literary journals Sardio and Letra Roja. He was a founding member of El Techo [see Aray] and is best known for literary works including Hombre que daba sed (Buenos Aires: Jorge Álvarez, 1967) and the epic novel País Portátil [1968] (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1969)—a work that reflects the dramatic clash between Venezuela’s developing urban environment and the fading rural traditions in the sixties. The latter won the prestigious Premio Internacional de Novela Seix Barral in 1969 and was made into a film in 1979 directed by Antonio Llerandi. After returning from a trip to Cuba, in November 1962 González León was questioned by the Venezuelan intelligence agency, the Dirección General de Policía (or DIGEPOL), for his involvement in the publication of Caupolicán Ovalles’ anti-Betancourt ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? His political militancy in the Venezuelan Communist Party (PCV) led to his imprisonment in January of 1964. His wife Mary Ferrero and fellow ballenero Daniel González were also detained that year. Their absences, along with a rekindled interest in the individual projects of some of El Techo’s members—Gabriel Morera, and Fernando Irazábal among them—resulted in a partial fracture of the group that year.

El Techo Publications González León, Carlos Contramaestre, Alfred Jarry et al. [Exhibition catalogue]. Homenaje a la necrofilia (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, November 1962). González León. [Essay]. “Investigación de las basuras,” prologue to Caupolicán Ovalles, ¿Duerme Ud. Señor presidente? (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, 1962). González León and Daniel González (photographs). [Compilation of texts and photograpns]. Asfalto-Infierno y otros relatos demoníacos (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1963). González León. [Essay/manifesto], “¿Por qué la ballena?,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). González León. [Short Story]. “Hombre que daba sed,” listed as forthcoming in rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964).

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GONZÁLEZ, Daniel (b. San Juan de los Morros, Edo. Guárico, Venezuela, 1934) Painter, photographer, and graphic designer

González studied painting and sculpture at Caracas’ Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas (1954−58). In 1957, he participated in the XVIII Salón Oficial exhibiting early geometric Works and had his First solo exhibitions of paintings and collages at the Museo de Bellas Artes (MBA) in 1959. A scholarship allowed him to travel and continue studies in France, Zagreb (film and animation) and Brussels (industrial aesthetics). González spent time in San Francisco, where he was in the orbit of Beat movement writers and artists including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Henry Miller and briefly attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Back in Caracas, González helped to organize and exhibited works in two important events that, together, heralded the rise of Informalism in Venezuela: Espacios Vivientes (Palacio Municipal, Maracaibo) and the Salón Experimental (Sala Mendoza, Caracas) (both 1960). He collaborated with Juan Calzadilla in the organization of the show “Venezuela: pintura hoy” (1960) which travelled to Havana. In 1961, he participated in “Tres siglos de pintura venezolana” (MBA) and “Cinco pintores venezolanos” as part of the Venezuelan delegation for the VI Bienal de São Paulo, along with José María Cruxent, Fernando Irazábal, Teresa Casanova, and Maruja Roldán (selection by Juan Calzadilla). In 1963, González’s work was widely seen in San Francisco: he participated in the show Pop art in San Francisco and exhibited his assemblages at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books and at the John Bolles Gallery. Over the years, González had kept a photographic register of Caracas’s progressive decay and deterioration that underscores the social disequilibrium present in such industrial societies as Venezuela. This concern led to his series of black paintings, Homenaje al petróleo, some of which [Alquitrana, Petroglifo, and Gesto y materia] he exhibited during the 1959 show at the MBA. González is credited with having been the first artist in Venezuela to experiment with industrial detritus in the construction of sculpted objects (Totem series). González was imprisoned in August- September of 1964, shortly after having designed rayado sobre el techo no. 3, for his political activity [see González León].

El Techo Publications González (photographs) and Adriano González León. [Compilation of texts and photographs]. Asfalto-Infierno y otros relatos demoníacos (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, 1963). González and Francisco Pérez Perdomo. [Exhibition catalogue]. [Daniel González:] Collages (Maracaibo: Galería 40 Grados a la Sombra, February 16, 1964).

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla Pedro Briceño, Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del magma (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961).

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Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, José María Cruxent, Pedro Briceño, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962). Solo Exhibition. [Daniel González:] Pintura. Escultura (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, 1963). Solo Exhibition. Asfalto-infierno: fotografías (Caracas: Galería-librería Ulises, 1963). Solo Exhibition. [Daniel González:] Collages [Engranaje] (Maracaibo: Galería 40 Grados a la Sombra, February 2, 1964). Solo Exhibition. [Daniel González:] Collages (Caracas: Museo de Bellas Artes, 1965). Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena (Caracas: Galería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965).

OGAZ, Dámaso (b. Santiago, Chile, 1924−90) Painter, mail artist, poet, and writer [born Víctor Manuel Sánchez Ogaz; also known as Víctor Antillanca and Simón Viñas]

Studied at the Instituto Pedagógico Técnico of the Universidad Técnica in his native city of Santiago. In Chile he apprenticed under the painters Hernán Gazmuri and Haroldo Donoso and participated in a design course that the German artist Josef Albers taught at the Department of Architecture of the Universidad Católica in 1953. Ogaz served as personal secretary and assistant to the esteemed Chilean poet Pablo de Rokha (1894−1968), whose son Carlos de Rokha was part of the literary generation of 1938 and one of the youngest members of La Mandrágora group [see Ossorio]. The group introduced Chilean audiences to the international Surrealist currents that, in Venezuela, were picked up by El Techo. Ogaz first went to Venezuela in 1961 to establish the short-lived Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano in the city of Trujillo. There he also exhibited his work at the Ateneo in Valera. In 1962, he left for Paris—where he exhibited at Galerie Saint Germaint (1962) and Galerie Lambert (1963)—and traveled widely in Europe. During this period, Ogaz introduced collages (which he called “visual poetry”) and modern semiotics into his multidisciplinary work. He remained in contact with Venezuelan colleagues and, in 1962, El Techo published one of his writings and listed him as their Chilean correspondent in several numbers of its Rayado sobre el techo. Ogaz was not a formal member of the collective until 1967 when, prompted by an invitation from Carlos Contramaestre, he decided to return to Venezuela and join the countercultural movement that they spearheaded from Caracas. Ogaz was widely accomplished as a mail artist—a genre that he pioneered in Venezuela—and created numerous handmade artist’s books

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through which he merged his interests in art, literature, and mankind. In 1968, following a show at the UCV’s School of Architecture, Ogaz abandoned painting and embarked on a process of discovering means through which to integrate art and life. In December 1969, Contramaestre’s monograph on Armando Reverón, El hombre mono, listed as forthcoming the poem “Transeunte Artificial” by Ogaz.

El Techo Publications Ogaz, illustrations by Carlos Contramaestre. [Poetry]. Espada de doble filo (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, Colección Sir Walter Raleigh, August 1962). Ogaz. [Essays]. La Ballena y lo Majamámico (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, Colección Docencia Ballenera no. 2, November 1967). Ogaz, Edmundo Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Xavier Domingo, Efraín Hurtado, Marcia Leyseca, and Tancredo Romero. [Anthology], Salve Amigos, Salve y Adiós (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, July 1968). Ogaz. [Poetry]. Los Métodos y las Deserciones Imaginarias (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, August 1968). Ogaz. [Prologue to Carlos Contramaestre’s monograph]. Armando Reverón. El Hombre Mono (Mérida, Venezuela: Euroamérica Impresores/ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, colección EL MACROCEFALO, December 1969).

El Techo Exhibitions Solo Exhibition. Las Majamámicas Edípicas, Facultad de Arquitectura, UCV (1968). Related texts by Caupolicán Ovalles, Edmundo Aray, and Juan Calzadilla. Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Baptista, Brandt, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Camacho, Erminy, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, Q. Castillo, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles (Caracas: Galería- Librería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], October 21, 1967).

OVALLES, Caupolicán (Guarenas, Edo. Miranda, Venezuela, 1936−2001) Poet [also known as (H)onorio and Hostias]

Best known for his lucid and iconoclastic attitude towards cultural institutions and the generalized formalism that characterized Venezuelan literary circles in the sixties. Ovalles obtained a law degree from the Universidad de Salamanca, Spain [see Contramaestre], and, upon returning to Venezuela around 1961, became involved with radicalized intellectual groups including Sardio and, politically, with the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria

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(MIR). Aligned with the Venezuelan guerilla movement, Ovalles used the poetic craft to disseminate and promote armed combat in the country. Was one of the founding members of El Techo [see Aray]. In 1962, El Techo published his controversial poem ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? which openly denounced president Rómulo Betancourt and the corrupt and hypocritical system of cronyism that had been put into place in the name of the democratic process. Copies were confiscated by the police and Ovalles suffered a brief exile in Cucutá and Bogotá as a result of the persecution. In July 1963, the remaining balleneros organized the exhibition Exposición tubular in honor of Ovalles with works by Jacobo Broges, Carlos Contramaestre, Fernando Irazábal, Hugo Baptista, Juan Calzadilla, Edmundo Aray and Mary Ferrero. On October 1967, Ovalles presented his epic poem Elegía [en rojo] a la muerte de Guatimocín, mi padre, alias El Globo at the opening of the group exhibition Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, held at the Galería-Librería Ulises in the Sabana Grande district. The participating artists, many of whom were balleneros or sympathizers, donated their works to Ovalles in the hope that their sale during the event would help to alleviate his precarious financial situation.

El Techo Publications Ovalles. [Poetry]. “Carta a Achab,” rayado sobre el techo no. 1 (March 1961). Ovalles. [Poetry]. ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de Ballena, May 1962). Ovalles. [Poetry]. En uso de razón (Caracas: Ediciones Tubulares del Techo de Ballena no. 1, (July 1963). Ovalles. [Poetry]. “Contraseñas,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). Ovalles. [Poetry]. Argimiro (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, 1965). Ovalles. [Poetry]. Elegía [en rojo] a la muerte de Guatimocín, mi padre, alias El Globo (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, September 1967).

MEMBERS

BAPTISTA, Hugo (b. La Grita, Edo. Táchira, Venezuela, 1935) Painter

Studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas from 1952 to 1956. He moved to Paris in 1956 to study at the Academy of the Grande Chaumière, where he spent four years. Baptista also spent time in Rome before returning to Venezuela in the late sixties. His work from that period is kindred to Fauvism in its painterly qualities and coloring. He traveled to Europe in 1961 and upon returning to Venezuela the following year was briefly imprisoned for his political activity. The experience led him to intensify his activism and to turn to political themes in work such as the series El sueño verdugo that he presented at the Ateneo de Caracas in 1965.

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El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlso Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965). Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Brandt, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Camacho, Erminy, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Ogaz, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, Q. Castillo, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles, (Caracas: Galería- Librería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], October 21, 1967).

BRANDT, Alberto (Caracas, Venezuela, 1924−70) Painter

Brandt attended high school in Baltimore, Maryland and pursued a degree in geology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He also studied at New York University. He excelled at sports; holding several national track and field records and, for a time, played soccer professionally in Venezuela. Brandt developed his interest in painting parallel to his academic and sportsmanship accomplishments. Between 1947 and 1948, two years before Los Disidentes coalesced in Paris, Brandt began to experiment with abstractionism. He was linked to Sardio and, in 1960, showed works at the Espacios Vivientes salon in Maracaibo as well as in the Salón Experimental (Sala Mendoza, Caracas). Although Brandt was not a diehard adherent of El Techo, he did participate in the exhibition/installation Homenaje a la cursilería (1961) and he is thought to have authored the manifesto distributed during opening night. And, in 1966, he realized his most humorous and irreverent exhibition, Falsarios Eróticos, alongside El Techo; exhibiting works including Evolución ninfomaníaca lenta pero obsesionante de la nieta de Kao-Ki and Serafino declara Rosa su locura desenfrenada. In the sixties he had an ethnomusicology show for Radio Nacional, Venezuela’s public broadcaster, through which he introduced Venezuelan audiences to the musical traditions of the Orient, Asia, South America and the Caribbean. Ill received by conservative factions, it was ultimately dropped from the lineup. Disillusioned with his country’s cultural milieu, Brandt departed for Czechoslovakia and Eastern Europe where, until his premature death in 1970, he participated in movements of the extreme avant-garde.

El Techo Publications [Attributed to] Brandt. [Manifesto]. “Homenaje a la Cursilería” (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, May-June 1961).

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El Techo Exhibtions Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965). Solo Exhibition. [Alberto Brandt:] Falsarios Eróticos (Caracas: Galería El Puente, November 1966). Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Baptista, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Camacho, Erminy, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Ogaz, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, Q. Castillo, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles, (Caracas: Galería- Librería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], October 21, 1967).

BRICEÑO, [Luis] Pedro (b. Barcelona, Edo. Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 1931) Sculptor

As a youth, he enrolled at the Law School of the UCV but dropped out to pursue training in art at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas. There he trained under the sculptors Ernesto Maragall and Martín Leonardo Funes. Upon graduating in 1954, Briceño traveled to Rome and enrolled at the Scuola D’Arti Ornamentali where he studied, until 1955, with Leonello Venturi. That year he transferred to London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts and studied with Robert Adams who introduced Briceño to iron and cast metal methods. He traveled to Paris in 1956 and ultimately settled in Madrid thanks to a scholarship from the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica. In the Spanish capital he met several members of Grupo El Paso [see Contramaestre] including the sculptors Jorge Oteiza Enbil (1908−2003)—who spent the years from 1934 to 1948 in South America (Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina and Chile)—and Pablo Serrano, the latter of whom pushed Briceño to exhibit his wood and cork pieces at Madrid’s Librería-Galería Clan. Settled in Venezuela in 1958, the sculptor taught at Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas and, in 1960, opened his atelier at El Conde neighborhood. By that point, his work was in the vein of Art Informel: he took advantage of the oxidation process and incorporated industrial and found materials into his works on metal. Like many other informalist adherents, Briceño exhibited at the Espacios Vivientes Salon in Maracaibo and at the Salón Experimental (Sala Mendoza, Caracas), both in 1960. He joined El Techo in 1961. In 1967, he settled permanently in Mexico.

El Techo Exhibtions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del magma, (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961).

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Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena, (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962). Group Exhibition [guests: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965).

CASTELLANOS, Gonzalo (dates unknown) Writer

Castellanos was a founding member of Sardio, who after having spent time in Germany where he fled to escaping the political situation, returned to Venezuela in 1961 just as enthusiasm for El Techo was brewing among certain members of the group [see Aray]. At the urging of Rodolfo Izaguirre, Salvador Garmendia, and Edmundo Aray, Castellanos wrote the controversial text “Testimonio sobre Cuba” which—in the context of the Cuban Revolution—troubled the United States’ relationship with Latin America. It was published in the eight and final number of the Revista Sardio (May-June 1961) that also included El Techo’s “Pre-Manifiesto,” which became the launching pad for the formal establishment of El Techo. Although Castellanos was thought to be far less politically active than Sardio’s more militant members, he did join the radical faction that went on to establish El Techo, participating in the publication of the first edition of rayado sobre el techo (1961).

CRUXENT, José María (Barcelona, Spain, 1911−2005) Painter and archeologist

Cruxent trained as an archaeologist at the Universidad de Barcelona in Spain. In 1937 also attended, briefly, the Academia de Artes y Oficios de La Lonja in the Catalonian capital. With the fall of the Spanish Republic, Cruxent abandoned Spain for Paris, where he cultivated an interest in Surrealism and attended lectures by André Breton. After eight months, Cruxent went to Belgium where, through the intercession of the Venezuelan ambassador, secured papers and passage to South America. He arrived in Caracas in 1939 and found work as a film projectionist. By 1942, Cruxent was teaching technical drawing in a number of private schools in Caracas. From 1944 to 1963, Cruxent directed and was the chief archaeology conservator at the Museo de Ciencias de Caracas. From 1944 onward, he published on speleological archeology in several important journals (Revista Nacional de Cultura and Memoria de la Sociedad de Ciencias Naturales La Salle, among them). He became a naturalized Venezuelan citizen in 1945. In 1953 he established Venezuela’s first archaeology program at the School of Anthropology and Sociology of

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the UCV and, in 1958 published the hallmark Arqueología Cronológica de Venezuela. He began painting professionally in 1960 when he exhibited at the Espacios Vivientes (Maracaibo) and Experimental (Sala Mendoza, Caracas) Salons. In 1961, Cruxent participated in the XXII Salón Oficial and began his affiliation with El Techo, exhibiting his work in the group’s first show, Para la restitución del magma. Cruxent was one of the five artists selected by Juan Calzadilla to represent Venezuela at the VI Bienal de São Paulo of 1961 [see Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal]. In 1963, Cruxent’s work was included in an exhibition of Venezuelan art in Bogotá (Museo de Arte Moderno) and in 22 Pintores venezolanos de hoy (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de la Universidad de Chile, Santiago) which traveled to Uruguay and Chile. In 1964 he exhibited his series of Parakinetic boxes, a term coined by the art critic Frank Popper to describe Cruxent’s unique incorporation of electricity and movement to geometric work, at the Couper Gallery in London. He participated in the XXVII Salón Oficial of 1966 but took a three year hiatus from painting to concentrate on archeological projects.

El Techo Exhibtions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla Carlos Contramaestre, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del Magma, (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, Pedro Briceño, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena, (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962). Group Exhibition. Sujetos Plásticos de la Ballena, (Caracas: Galería- librería Ulises, 1963). Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965).

ERMINY, Perán (b. Barcelona, Edo. Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 1929) Writer, art critic, and artist

Erminy entered the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Aplicadas de Caracas in 1942 but was ultimately expelled when he became part of an initial group of students that demanded increased teaching of international artistic movements. He was one of the founders of the watershed Taller Libre de Arte (1948−52)—along with artists including Mateo Manure, Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Pascual Navarro, and the writers Juan Liscano and Alejo Carpentier who was exiled to Venezuela from 1945 to 1949—which sought to investigate abstractionism and new artistic tendencies. Although the Taller Libre de Arte remained formally conservative, it set the stage for a generalized revitalization of the

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Venezuelan cultural scene in the ensuing decade. Exiled to Paris in 1949, Erminy entered the École du Louvre, the Sorbonne, and the Ecole des hautes études, where he studied art and philosophy with, among others, Pierre Francastel, Roland Barthes y René Huyghe. He was a founding member of Los Disidentes along with Otero, Manaure, Navarro, and José Rafael Guillent Pérez and in March of 1950, from Paris, participated in the publication of the first of its five journals. Erminy exhibited geometric abstract works at this time in several Parisian exhibition spaces including Galerie du Dragon and the Galerie Colette Allendy. Erminy was also vocal in expressing criticism against the politicized use of geometric abstraction by the Venezuelan state, a sentiment that was shared by Jacobo Borges, Soto and Otero. He was particularly wary of the potential misuse of Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s concept of the integration of the arts in the landmark Ciudad Universitaria to push a political agenda. Erminy returned to Venezuela in 1956 and joined political opposition against Pérez Jiménez, was detained, imprisoned in Caracas’ El Obispo jailed, and ultimately freed in 1958 with the toppling of the regime. Erminy exhibited at the Espacios Vivientes Salon in Maracaibo and at the Salón Experimental (Sala Mendoza, Caracas), both in 1960. He returned to Europe briefly in 1960—in Paris he partook of courses offered by Jean Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault—and, back in Venezuela, gravitated to El Techo in 1961.

El Techo Publication Erminy, Edmundo Aray, Juan Calzadilla, and Roberto Fernández Retamar. [Umberto Peña:] Litografías (Caracas: Galería del Techo de la Ballena, August 1967).

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965). Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Baptista, Brandt, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Camacho, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Ogaz, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, Q. Castillo, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles (Caracas: Galería del Techo, October 21, 1967).

FERRERO, Mary (b. Born María Isabel Ferrero Rodríguez, Bahía Blanca, Argentina, year of birth unknown−2003) Writer and editor

Ferrero established herself in Caracas in 1958 after having met her husband Adriano González León in Argentina, where he had traveled to see the writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. She was integral to many of Venezuela’s avant-garde journals of the sixties

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including rayado sobre el techo, Tabla Redonda, and Crítica Contemporánea. Ferrero was also deeply committed to Venezuela’s student movement and, later in life, occupied important positions in several state run publishing houses.

El Techo Publications Ferrero. [Text]. “El primer hombre se detiene,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). Ferrero. [Prose]. “Delirio de los bultos postales,” listed as forthcoming in rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964).

El Techo Exhibtions Group Exhibition [with: Jacobo Borges, Carlos Contramaestre, Fernando Irazábal, Juan Calzadillla, and Edmundo Aray], Exposición tubular (Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles), (Caracas: July 1963).

HURTADO, Efraín (Calabozo, Edo. Guárico, Venezuela, 1935−78) Anthropologist, poet, and essayist

Hurtado graduated with a degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the UCV. He pursued postgraduate degrees in Argentina and in France, where he lived from 1957 to 1967 and where he had the opportunity to interview writers including Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Semprún, Mario Vargas Llosa, Phillipe Sollers and Severo Sarduy. Following his return to Venezuela, he joined the faculty of the UCV. Member of Sardio and El Techo. He co- founded several Venezuelan literary journals including Rocinante and Uno y múltiple. Hurtado’s published work includes the poetic anthologies Papeles de condenado (Boconó, Venezuela: Ateneo de Boconó, 1964), Redes maestras (1966), A dos palmos apenas (1972), and the posthumous Escampos (1979).

El Techo Publications Hurtado. [Short story]. “En los huecos,” rayado sobre el techo no. 2 (May 1963). Hurtado, “Zarpasos,” Margen (Paris), no. 1 (October-November 1966).

IRAZÁBAL, Fernando (b. Barcelona, Edo. Anzoátegui, Venezuela, 1936) Painter, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer

Irazábal studied art at the Escuela Técnica de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, where Armando Reverón and Carlos Cruz Diez had also trained. He enrolled in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the UCV but he abandoned these studies in 1956 to devote himself to painting full time. He is considered one of the most important proponents of Art Informel in Venezuela. In 1959 he participated in the XX Salón Oficial (with his oil/enamel on canvas Aquelarre) and he showed his drawings at the Exposición Nacional del Dibujo, el Grabado y el Monotipo. Like many of the artists associated with El Techo, he was part of the Espacios Vivientes Salon (Palacio Municipal, Maracaibo) and the Salón

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Experimental (Sala Mendoza) (both in 1960) that crystallized the informalist current in Venezuela. Irazábal was one of the five artists selected by Juan Calzadilla to represent Venezuela in the VI Bienal de São Paulo of 1961 [see González, Cruxent]. That year, one of his drawings was awarded a prize during the Tercera exposición nacional de dibujo y grabado held at the UCV’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning. In 1964, Irazábal received the Premio Andrés Pérez Mujica (shared with Vladimir Zabaleta) at the XXII Salón Arturo Michelena. Between November 1964 and the early months of 1965, the artist was one of eight Venezuelans who worked alongside the British sculptor Kenneth Armitage (1916−2002) during his brief stay in Caracas. He received the Premio María Eugenia Curiel during the XXIV Salón Oficial of 1963. In 1965, Irazábal was awarded a scholarship from the Fundación Fina Gómez during the XXVI Salón Oficial which allowed him to travel to Europe. Irazábal has been interested in the convergence of art and science throughout his long career and, in the sixties, developed an audio visual practice that remained parallel to his informalist canvases. Travel to the United States in 1968 allowed him personal access to the kindred media art collective USCO [“The Company of Us”] founded by Michael Callahan and Greg Stern.

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del Magma, (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Pedro Briceño, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena, (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962). Solo Exhibition. Bestias y occisos (Caracas: Sala Mendoza, April 1962). Group Exhibition [with: Jacobo Borges, Carlos Contramaestre, Juan Calzadillla, Edmundo Aray and Mary Ferrero], Exposición tubular (Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles), (Caracas: July 1963). Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez; balleneros: Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965).

IZAGUIRRE, Rodolfo (b. Caracas, Venezuela, 1931) Writer and film critic

Izaguirre began a law degree at the Sorbonne in Paris that he never finished because he decided to pursue, instead, his burgeoning interest in film professionally. In Paris, he was an active participant in programing and film screenings held at the Cinémathèque Française, which was in close proximity to his apartment. By the late fifties, Izaguirre had

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returned to Caracas and joined Sardio and, eventually, also El Techo. In August 1964, El Techo’s Rayado sobre el techo no. 3 listed the film critic as the group’s Rome correspondent. Izaguirre won top prize at the Bienal Latinoamericana de Literatura “José Rafael Pocaterra” (Valencia, Venezuela) in 1967 for his book Alacranes (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1968). Izaguirre had a long and distinguised career as a film critic and cultural worker. In 1968, he was named director of Venezuela’s Cinemateca Nacional, a position he held for twenty five years. Among his numerous publications from this period are El cine venezolano (1966) and Historia sentimental del cine americano (1968). Izaguirre also presented “El cine, mitología de lo cotidiano,” a radio program from Radio Nacional de Venezuela, for over thirty years.

El Techo Publications Izaguirre. [Catalogue essay]. [Gabriel Morera:] Cabezas filosóficas, (Caracas: Galería-librería Ulises, September 22−October 7, 1961). Izaguirre. [Catalogue essay]. [Gabriel Morera:] Cabezas filosóficas, (Maracaibo: Galería 40 Grados a la Sombra, 1962).

LUQUE, Ángel (b. Córdoba, Spain, 1927) Painter and graphic artist

The self-taught Spanish artist Ángel Luque lived in Venezuela from 1955 to 1967. Between 1948 and 1955, he was active in the Madrid artistic scene; participating in a number of group exhibitions. Luque was part of the Madrid-based Artistas de Hoy group, which met and exhibited their nonfigurative work at the Librería-Galería Fernando Fe (Puerta del Sol, Madrid) in the mid-fifties. The group included, among others, Jorge Oteiza, Eduardo Chillida (1924−2002), Luis Feito, and Rafael Canogar, all of whom would go on to participate in El Paso [see Contramaestre and Briceño]. In 1960 Luque joined the ranks of the Venezuelan informalists through his participation in the Salón Experimental (Sala Mendoza). In 1961, the artist received the Premio Puebla de Bolívar during the XXII Salón Oficial. The following year, 1962, he won the Premio Nacional de Dibujo y Grabado at the XXIII Salón Oficial and also the Premio Dirección de Cultura during the Cuarta exposición nacional de dibujo y grabado (Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, UCV). In 1963, his work received an honorary mention in the XXIV Salón Oficial. Luque participated in El Techo’s activities from its beginings in 1961 through 1964. That year he was deported to Spain because of his involvement in the kidnapping of Lt. Col. Michael Smolen, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the Venezuelan Air Force.

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Gabriel Morera, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del Magma, (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961).

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Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Pedro Briceño, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena, (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962).

MORERA, Gabriel (b. Madrid, Spain, 1933) Painter, sculptor, photographer, and ceramist

Morera was born in Madrid to a Spanish father and a Venezuelan mother. Between 1951 and 1954, Morera studied drawing and painting at the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid. He arrived in Venezuela in Janaury 1955 and soon met Alberto Brandt; together they experimented with textural materials and informalist methods. He returned to Europe in 1956, this time settling in Paris where he met the Danish filmmaker Lene Rosenkilde. Together they traveled Europe, spending time in Copenhagen where Morera decorated the store Crome & Goldschmidt. During this period, the artist exhibited at the Galería La Roue (Paris) and at Copenhagen’s Laurine Gallery. In 1957, he returned to Venezuela where he married Rosenkilde (divorced in 1964). In 1960 he joined the ranks of the Venezuelan informalists through his participation in the Salón Experimental (Sala Mendoza). That year, he exhibited his Cabezas filosóficas series at the Arne Juel Gallery in Copenhagen. He joined El Techo in 1961 the same year that he presented the series in Caracas at the Galería- librería Ulises. In 1963, Morera won a fellowship from the McDowell Foundation that funded a four month residency at their artists’ colony in New Hampshire. There he began to work on mixed media boxed assemblages—such as Life Is Better than Death, Familia americana and Pequeña bandera de Venezuela, all in the collection of the GAN—that recall the work of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. After a brief period in Mexico, in 1964 he moved to New York—he is listed as El Techo’s New York correspondent in the Rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August)—where he taught at a Montessori School on the Lower East Side. Although Morera lived in New York until 1973, he remained active in the Venezuelan cultural scene, returning often to Caracas and exhibiting his work in a number of important exhibitions such as the III Bienal Armando Reverón (1965), the XXIX Salón Oficial (1968), and the XXX Salón Oficial (1969).

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. Para la restitución del Magma, (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Solo Exhibition. [Gabriel Morera:] Cabezas filosóficas, (Caracas: Galería- librería Ulises, September 22−October 7, 1961). Solo Exhibition. [Gabriel Morera:] Cabezas filosóficas, (Maracaibo: Galería 40 Grados a la Sombra, 1962).

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Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Pedro Briceño, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena, (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962). Group Exhibition. Sujetos Plásticos de la Ballena (Caracas: Galería- Librería Ulises, 1963). Group Exhibition [with: Baptista, Briceño, Carlos Castillo and Renato Rodríguez, Brandt, Cruxent, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Irazábal, Morera, Daniel González, Erminy]. Sujetos plásticos de la ballena, (Caracas: Galería-Librería Ulises [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], March 1965).

PÉREZ PERDOMO, Francisco (Boconó, Edo. Trujillo, Venezuela, 1930−2013) Poet and literary critic

Studied law at the UCV. Founding member of Sardio (1958) and El Techo (1961) [see Aray]. Pérez Perdomo published his first book of poetry, Fantasmas y enfermedades, in 1961 (Caracas: Ediciones Sardio). His poetic style recalls Kafka, Michaux, and the influence of the esteemed Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890−1930). In 1966, Pérez Perdomo was recognized by the Bienal Latinoamericana de Literatura “José Rafael Pocaterra” (Valencia, Venezuela) for his book Depravación de los Astros (Caracas: Ed. Arte, 1966).

El Techo Publications Pérez Perdomo. [Poetry]. Los venenos fieles, (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, November 1963) Pérez Perdomo. [Essay, introductory text]. “Roces de familia,” Borges. Las jugadoras (Caracas: Galería del techo, July 1965).

QUINTANA CASTILLO, Manuel (b. Caucagua, Edo. Miranda, Venezuela, 1928) Painter

Born in the coastal Estado Miranda in the outskirts of Caracas, Quintana Castillo moved to the city with his family when he was two years old. He studied painting and sculpture at Caracas’ Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas (19946−49) under Marcos Castillo, Luis Alfredo López Méndez, Armando Lira, Pedro Ángel González and Rafael Monasterios, among others. In 1949, he obtained a copy of Joaquín Torres García’s Universalismo constructivo, whose teachings he assimilated, and by 1951 developed into a personal two- dimensional geometric practice that was also influenced by Paul Klee and Rufino Tamayo. In 1955, Quintana Castillo won the Premio Henrique Otero Vizcarrondo at the XVI Salón Oficial for his work Cúpira (collection of GAN) and a paintings prize at the VII Salón

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Planchart for his La bailarina nocturna. Other prizes from the fifties and sixties period include: Premio John Boulton, XVII Salón Oficial (1956); First prize in drawing, Primera exposición nacional de dibujo y grabado (Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, UCV, 1959); and the Premio Antonio Esteban Frías, XXV Salón Oficial (1964). In 1960 Quintana Castillo participated in the “Espacios vivientes” Salon (Palacio Municipal, Maracaibo) with the works Un tiempo remoto and Reino solar. That year, his work also appeared at the Bienal de México in Mexico City, in the exhibition Pintores venezolanos (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City), and Venezuela: pintura de hoy shown in Havana and Caracas. In 1961, Quintana received funding to travel to Paris, Rome, Madrid and Barcelona. In the latter, he spent time at the Academia Massana and had the opportunity to experience the works of Joan Miró first hand. In 1962 he was part of the Venezuelan delegation to the XXXI Venice Biennial with the work Image et memoire/Abraxas. In 1963 he was active in the group El León de Oro. From 1965 to 1967, he directed the radio broadcast of “Cuaderno de pintura” at Radio Nacional de Venezuela.

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Juan Calzadillla Carlos Contramaestre, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, and Gabriel Morera]. para la restitución del magma (Caracas: Galería El Techo de la Ballena, March 1961). Group Exhibition [with: Teresa Casanova, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Pedro Briceño]. El Techo de la Ballena (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962). Group Exhibition [with: A. Palacios, Abreu, Arrietti, Baptista, Brandt, Calzadilla, Contramaestre, Camacho, Erminy, Guinard, Hung, Manaure, Milian, Najul, Ogaz, Oliveri, Peña, Prada, R. Pérez, Ravelo and Zapata]. Exposición Chivo Salvaje. Dibujos, grabados, esculturas, benefitting Caupolicán Ovalles (Caracas: Galería- Librería Ulises, [Centro Comercial del Este, Local 11], October 21, 1967).

SELECTED COLLABORATORS IN VENEZUELA

ALIZO, David (1941−2008)

El Techo Publications Alizo. [Essay]. “Alarma general,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964).

BORGES, Jacobo (b. 1933) Artist

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Born in Caracas to working-class parents, Jacobo Borges spent his youth and adolescence in the neighborhoods of El Cementerio and Catia. Showing aptitude from an early age, his family enrolled him at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Caracas from 1936 to 1944 where he returned to again as a young adult in 1949. In 1951 Borges worked in the Taller Libre de Arte, a meeting ground for artists and intellectuals such as Alejo Carpentier and Gastón Diehl that sought to renew and modernize the Venezuelan avant-garde. In 1952, a monetary prize allowed him to travel to Paris where he remained several years. He returned to Venezuela in 1956, erupting into the artistic scene with powerful figurative work laden with aggressive metaphors, illusionary spontaneity, and fragmentary time. In 1958, Borges designed experimental stage sets for the several contemporary Venezuelan playwrights. By the mid-sixties, Borges became increasingly involved in political activism and, as his politics radicalized, he began to question the pertinence of his aesthetic practice. In July 1965, Borges presented his Las Jugadoras series at the Galería del Techo. In the accompanying text, Juan Calzadilla lauds Borges’ ideologically charged figurative work as an alternative to both the stagnant social realism and the formulaic geometric abstraction that dominated the artistic scene in Caracas at that moment. In Calzadilla’s view, Borges’ pessimistic paintings provided the impetus for a collective confrontation with this reality, a posture that resonated with the kindred spirit of the members of El Techo. Ultimately, he abandoned painting from 1965 to 1970 during which time he continued his grassroots, community-focused activism as well as organized the large-scale multidisciplinary event Imagen de Caracas (1967). The artworks that emerged in 1970, the same year that he helped to establish the MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo] political party, reflected the artist’s heightened collective consciousness. In the mid-eighties, his style further evolved into a more placid version of his expressionistic work of the sixties, a variant of which he still practices to this day.

El Techo Exhibitions Group Exhibition [with: Carlos Contramaestre, Fernando Irazábal, Juan Calzadillla, Edmundo Aray and Mary Ferrero], Exposición tubular (Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles), (Caracas: July 1963). Borges. [Essay by Pérez Perdomo]. Borges. Las jugadoras (Caracas: Galería del techo, July 1965).

CASANOVA, Teresa (b. 1932) Group Exhibition [with: Pedro Briceño, José María Cruxent, Daniel González, Hernández Guerra, Fernando Irazábal, Ángel Luque, Gabriel Morera, Maruja Roldán, Jaimes Sánchez and Manuel Quintana Castillo]. El Techo de la Ballena (Barcelona, Venezuela: Escuela de Bellas Artes “Armando Reverón,” January-February 1962).

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GASPARINI, Paolo (b. Gorizia, Italy, 1934) Photographer

Gasparini moved to Venezuela in 1954 at the age of thirty. Initially, he sought commissions as a photographer of architecture but grew increasingly interested in landscape and the life of the Venezuelan countryside. Gasparini received commissions to document the architectural works famed architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and, in 1957, his exhibition Arquitectura en Venezuela traveled to important museums in the United States. The following year he participated in the exhibition Photographs from the Museum Collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, in 1961 Gasparini joined a number of Venezuelan and international intellectuals in moving to Cuba. There he worked at the Consejo Nacional de Cultura. During this time, he collaborated with the Cuban poet Edmundo Desnoes in Cómo son los héroes, published by El Techo de la Ballena in August 1965. He returned to Venezuela in 1967 and took part in the Venezuelan Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. His work, based on neo-realism, was influenced by that of Paul Strand, and he was particularly interested in denouncing the new urban codes, social structures, and transformations that Caracas experienced during the fifties and sixties.

El Techo Publication Gasparini and Edmundo Desnoes, Cómo son los héroes (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, August, 1965).

El Techo Exhibitions Solo show. [Paolo Gasparini:] Como son los héroes (Caracas: Galería del techo, Sabana Grande, August 6−19, 1965).

GRAMCKO, Elsa (1925−94) Artist El Techo Publication El Techo de la Ballena, catalogue for her series Hierros (Caracas: Galería G, March 1961).

LEYSECA, Marcia (dates unknown) Artist

El Techo Publication Leyseca, Edmundo Aray, Juan Calzadilla, Carlos Contramaestre, Xavier Domingo, Efraín Hurtado, Dámaso Ogaz, and Tancredo Romero. [Anthology], Salve Amigos, Salve y Adiós, (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, July 1968).

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RAMA, Ángel (1926−83) Uruguayan literary critic, active in Venezuela

El Techo Event [Roundtable]. La Intervención Cultural en América Latina, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ángel Rama, Siné, José Miguel Oviedo, Basilia Papastamatiu, Eleazar Díaz Rangel, Adriano González León, Edmundo Aray, August 1967.

REBOLLEDO, Carlos (b. 1933) Filmmaker

Collaboration Screenplay and screen adaptation for Pozo Muerto, co-written with Edmundo Aray and Antonio de la Rosa (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, documental 30, January 1967).

ROSA, Antonio de la (dates unknown) Filmmaker

Collaboration Screenplay and screen adaptation for Pozo Muerto, co-written with Edmundo Aray and Carlos Rebolledo (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, documental 30, January 1967).

SAAD, Ezequiel (b. 1943)

El Techo Publication Saad, Hablar con Propiedad (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, 1968).

SELECTED INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATORS AND SYMPATHIZERS

ALCÁNTARA, Pedro (dates unknown) Colombian artist

El Techo exhibition Group Exhibition [with Carlos Granada, Augusto Rendón, and Darío Morales], Testimonios (Caracas: Galería del Techo, June 1967).

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ARRABAL, Fernando (b. 1932) Spanish playwright

El Techo Publication Arrabal. [Short story]. “Primera comunión,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964).

ASTURIAS, Rodrigo (dates unknown) Guatemalan writer.

Listed as correspondent in Guatemala in Rayado 3 (August 1964)

ÁVILA ECHAZU, Edgar (b. 1932) Bolivian.

Listed as correspondent in La Paz, Bolivia in Rayado 3 (August 1964)

BRETON, André (1896−1966) French artist and intellectual

El Techo Publication André Breton, Jorge Camacho, Xavier Domingo, Edmundo Aray. Historia del Ojo (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, June 1965).

CAMACHO, Jorge (1934−2011) Cuban artist

El Techo Publications Camacho. [Essay]. “El erotismo profanatorio de la Santa Ana de Leonardo,” March 1964, rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). André Breton, Jorge Camacho, Xavier Domingo, Edmundo Aray. Historia del Ojo (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, June 1965).

DESNOES, Edmundo (b. 1930) Cuban writer

Listed as correspondent in Havana, Cuba in Rayado 3 (August 1964)

El Techo Publications

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Desnoes, “A nivel de sus ojos,” text for Cómo son los héroes [exhibition of Paolo Gasparini’s photographs) (Caracas: Galería del Techo, August 1965). Desnoes, text for Roberto Matta. La Llave de los Campos [exhibition of recent Works by Roberto Matta] (Caracas: Galería del Techo, April 1965).

DALTON, Roque (1935−75) Salvadorean poet and journalist

Listed as correspondent in San Salvador, El Salvador in Rayado 3 (August 1964)

FERNÁNDEZ RETAMAR, Roberto (b. 1930) Cuban writer

El Techo Publication Fernández Retamar, Litografías [recent Works by Umberto Peña] (Caracas: Galería del Techo, August 1967]

FERLINGHETTI, Lawrence (b. 1919) North American Beat poet

Listed as correspondent in San Francisco, Californa in rayado sobre el techo 3 (August 1964)

El Techo Publications Ferlinghetti. [Poem]. “Obligatorio del chatarrero,” rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). Ferlinghetti. [Poem]. “Coney Island Mental,” listed as forthcoming in the back matter of Edmundo Aray, Sube para Bajar (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, December 1963).

GIRONDO, Oliverio (1891−1967) Argentinean poet

El Techo Publication Girondo, “Topatumba” [poem] reproduced in poster format, April 1963.

GRANADA, Carlos (b. 1933) Colombian artist

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El Techo Exhibition Group Exhibition [with Pedro Alcántara, Augusto Rendón, and Darío Morales]. Testimonios (Caracas: Galería del Techo, June 1967).

GRINBERG, Miguel (b. 1937) Argentinean writer.

Listed, along with Arnaldo Liberman, as correspondent in Buenos Aires, Argentina in rayado 3 (August 1964).

MATTA ECHAUREN, Roberto (1911−2002) Chilean artist

El Techo Exhibition Roberto Matta. La Llave de los Campos [exhibition of recent works by Roberto Matta] (Caracas: Galería del Techo, April 1965).

MILLER, Henry (1891−1980) North American writer

El Techo Publications Miller. [Essay]. “Henry Miller levanta su tienda,” prologue to Trampa y traición, rayado sobre el techo no. 3 (August 1964). Essay is illustrated with Miller’s own drawings and Daniel González’s photographs of Miller at work. Essay, “Trampa y Traición,” listed as forthcoming in the back matter of Edmundo Aray, Sube para Bajar (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, December 1963).

Morales, Darío (1944−88) Colombian artist

El Techo Exhibition Group Exhibition [with Pedro Alcántara, Carlos Granada, and Augusto Rendón]. Testimonios (Caracas: Galería del Techo, June 1967).

ONETTI, Juan Carlos (1909−94) Uruguayan novelist

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Ossorio, Gustavo (1911−49) Chilean poet

His work had minimal public dissemination in his lifetime. Yet, after his premature death in 1949, he became a cult figure for an elite set of Chilean intellectuals that included Dámso Ogaz and the Surrealist Grupo Mandrágora, a group with which he collaborated on at least two known occasions (Revista Mandrágora no. 5 and no. 6). It was probably Ogaz who made the arrangements for El Techo to publish the esoteric poem “Contacto Terrestre”— which Ossorio wrote while interned at the Sanatorio El Peral, an insane asylum in Santiago—in Caracas (1964). The poem was subsequently published in book form in 1968 (Coleccion Poesía Universal, Revista Orfeo, 1968). His best known work, Sentido Sombrío of 1948, is one of three books that Ossorio published during his lifetime.

El Techo Publications Ossorio. [Poem]. “Contacto terrestre,” listed as forthcoming in the back matter of Edmundo Aray, Sube para Bajar (Caracas: Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, December 1963).

OVIEDO, José Miguel (b. 1934) Peruvian literary critic

El Techo Event [Roundtable]. La Intervención Cultural en América Latina, Juan Carlos Onetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, Angel Rama, Siné, José Miguel Oviedo, Basilia Papastamatiu, Eleazar Díaz Rangel, Adriano González León, Edmundo Aray, August 1967.

PIAZZA, Luis Guillermo (1921−2007) Argentinean writer

Listed as correspondent in Mexico in Rayado 3 (August 1964)

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PUBÉN, José (1936−97) Colombian writer

Listed as correspondent in Bogotá, Colombia in Rayado 3 (August 1964)

RENDÓN, Augusto (b. 1933) Colombian artist

El Techo Exhibition Group Exhibition [with: Pedro Alcántara, Carlos Granada, Augusto Rendón, and Darío Morales]. Testimonios (Caracas: Galería del Techo, June 1967).

SINÉ (b. Maurice Sinet, 1928) French Draftsman and cartoonist

El Techo Exhibition Siné. [Solo Exhibition]. SinéBallena (Caracas: Galería del Techo, August 1967).

VASCO, Juan Antonio (1924−84) Argentinean poet

Listed as correspondent in Montevideo, Uruguay in rayado 3 (August 1964)

ZALAMEA, Jorge (1905−69) Colombian writer

El Techo Publication Zalamea, Las aguas vivas del Vietnam [anthology of Vietnamese poetry] (Caracas: El Techo de la Ballena, December 1967).

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APPENDIX C – BRIEF CHRONOLOGY1

1952 December 2: Military general Marcos Pérez Jiménez assumes the role of Provisional President of Venezuela.

1956 Completion of Carlos Raul Villanueva’s campus for the UCV, begun in 1944. Carlos Contramaestre departs for Spain to complete medical studies at the Universidad de Salamanca. There he is joined by Caupolicán Ovalles and Alfredo Montilla.

1958 January 23: Venezuelan National Armed Forces overthrow Pérez Jiménez and call elections for November.

November: Rómulo Betancourt is elected president in popular elections.

1959 January 1: In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista is ousted as president when Fidel Castro's forces enter Havana. January: Fidel Castro visits Venezuela on the first anniversary of the military uprising against Pérez Jiménez.

February 13: Running on the Acción Democrática (AD) ticket, Rómulo Betancourt initiates his second presidential term.

1960 February 14−28: Venezuelan informalists organize their first group exhibition, Espacios vivientes, at Maracaibo’s Palacio Municipal.

1 This chronology builds on the one prepared by María Carlota Pérez and Israel Ortega for the Finding Aid to El Techo de la Ballena Collection in the Museum of Modern Art Library, 2013, multiple dates of access, http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared//pdfs/docs/learn/archives/el_techo_finding_aid.pdf.

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April: establishment of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) from within youth brigades of the AD. Salvador Garmendia is a founding member. April 21: Brasil inaugurates its new capital city, Brasília, whose construction had begun in 1956.

July 5: Cuba nationalizes all American companies and properties in Cuba and the U.S. retaliates by imposing a trade embargo. July 22: Group exhibition Venezuela Pintura Hoy opens at Havana’s Palacio de Bellas Artes (Dirección de Cultura, Ministerio de Educación).

August 28: Group exhibition Venezuela Pintura Hoy opens at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas.

September 18−October 2: Second informalist group exhibition, Salón Experimental, at the Sala Mendoza in Caracas.

October 23: Venezuelan informalists hold a group show in Cumaná at the Salón de Lectura.

November 23: Venezuelan informalists hold a group show in Valencia at the Ateneo de Valencia.

December 1: Informalist group exhibition opens in Los Teques at the Biblioteca Cecilio Acosta.

1961 Carlos Contramaestre and Caupolicán Ovalles return from Spain. Publication Salvador Garmendia: Los habitantes (Ediciones Sardio). Exhibition Hugo Baptista: Brístoles at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. Exhibition Angel Luque: Pintura at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. Publication of Tabique Informalista 1.

January 3: The United States ends diplomatic relations with Cuba.

March 10-16: III Congress of the Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV) convenes and the party decides to prepare for armed combat against Betancourt’s government. March 24: Exhibition Para restituir el magma, Galería del Techo, El Conde, Caracas. March 24: Publication of rayado sobre el techo, no. 1, which includes El Techo de la Ballena’s first manifesto. March 25: Publication of foundational manifesto “Las instituciones de cultura nos roban el oxígeno” by El Techo de la Ballena (La Esfera).

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April 17−20: In Cuba, failure of the anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion. April 20: Publication of newspaper article “Sobre cierta ballena” by Esteban Muro (penname of Juan Calzadilla) (El Nacional).

May: Publication of last issue of Sardio, revista bimensual de cultura, vol. 8 (Ediciones Sardio). It includes several foundational texts for El Techo. May 1: Exhibition Homenaje a la cursilería opens at Galería del Techo, El Conde, Caracas. May 7: El Techo prints the text for Homenaje a la cursilería, presumably written by Alberto Brandt. May 11: Publication of newspaper article “Carta al informalismo” by Moisés Ottop (Juan Calzadilla) (El Nacional).

June 26: failed military insurrection known as El Barcelonazo in the coastal city of Barcelona leaves nearly sixteen people dead and nine wounded. July 14: Publication of Francisco Pérez Perdomo: Fantasmas y enfermedades (Ediciones Sardio). July 19: Exhibition Daniel González at Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, UCV, Caracas.

September 14: Publication Edmundo Aray: Nadie quiere descansar (Ediciones Sardio). September 22: Exhibition Gabriel Morera: Cabezas filosóficas, Librería Ulises, Caracas.

September-December: El Techo de la Ballena sends an unofficial selection of artworks for the VI Sao Paulo Biennial [organized by Juan Calzadilla, it included works by Irazábal, Casanova, Cruxent, Rolando, and González].

October 17: Members of El Techo de la Ballena exhibit in a group exhibition of Informalism at Galería G, Caracas.

1962 The Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV) establishes its militant Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN) and its guerrilla organization, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). Hugo Baptista imprisoned.

January 18: Exhibition Ángel Luque: Dibujos sobre El Muro at Galería El Muro, Caracas January 22−31: The Organization of American States holds meetings at Punta del Este, Uruguay, resulting in Cuba’s exclusion from participation in the inter- American system.

287

January-February: Members of El Techo de la Ballena exhibit in a group exhibition of Informalism at Escuela de Bellas Artes Armando Reverón, Barcelona, Venezuela.

Spring: Caupolicán Ovalles takes exile in Bogotá.

March 30−April 15: Exhibition Fernando Irazábal: Bestias, occisos at Sala Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, Caracas.

May 1: Publication Caupolicán Ovalles: ¿Duerme usted, señor Presidente? May 4: Coup d’état attemp in Carúpano fails.

June 2: El Porteñazo, the uprising supported by civilians at the naval base of Puerto Cabello, leaves over 400 dead and 700 wounded. June 15: Exhibition Gabriel Morera at Galería 40º a la Sombra, Maracaibo. June 17: Exhibition Gabriel Morera at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

August: Publication Dámaso Ogaz: Espada de doble filo.

September: Exhibition J.M. Cruxent at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

October 12: Publication Juan Calzadilla: Dictado por la jauría. October 14: Exhibition Fernando Irazábal at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. October: Cuban Missile Crisis; the U.S. government declares a partial blockade of Cuba in view of the Soviet’s continued delivery of weapons to the island.

November: Carlos Contramaestre is recognized with the Ateneo de Caracas Prize at the IV Exposición Nacional de Dibujo y Grabado, Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, UCV, Caracas. November: Adriano González León imprisoned. November 2: Exhibition Carlos Contramaestre: Homenaje a la necrofilia at Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande (Villaflor Street no. 16), Caracas.

1963 January: Gabriel Morera is awarded a grant at McDowell Foundation Colony, New Hampshire January 8: Exhibition Gabriel Morera, Galeria G, Caracas. January 23: Exhibition Daniel González: AsfaltoInfierno at Librería Ulises, Caracas and publication of Adriano González León and Daniel González: AsfaltoInfierno.

March 3: Exhibition Alberto Brandt at Sala de Exposiciones Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, Caracas.

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March 8: Newspaper article “Dos años de la ballena” by El Techo de la Ballena (El Clarín de los Viernes) and Exhibition Juan Calzadilla: Dibujos coloidales at Librería Ulises, Caracas. March 29: Group exhibition Sujetos plásticos de la ballena at Librería Ulises, Caracas.

April 19: Publicaction Oliverio Girondo: Topatumba.

May: Publication of rayado sobre el Techo no. 2, which included the group’s second manifesto.

June 7: Exhibition Fernando Irazábal at Galería G, Caracas.

July 5: Publication Caupolicán Ovalles: En uso de la razón. July 16: Exhibition Exposición tubular. Homenaje a Caupolicán Ovalles at Galería-Librería Ulises, Caracas.

August: Publication Edmundo Aray: Twist presidencial. August 28: In the United States, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., makes his famous speech “I have a dream.”

September 28: Venezuelan Guerrilla forces attacks El Encanto train, leaving both military and civilians injured or dead. The majority of the country rejects these actions while the government outlawed communist organizations PCV and MIR.

October 18: Newspaper article “Para aplastar el infinito” by El Techo de la Ballena (El Clarín de los Viernes).

November 2: Publication Francisco Pérez Perdomo: Los venenos fieles. November 23: Publication Edmundo Aray: Sube para bajar.

December: Guerrilla organizations call for general abstention in the next presidential elections, however almost 90% of voters participated, electing the ruling party’s candidate.

1964 Fernando Irazábal is awarded the Andrés Pérez Mujica Prize at XXII Salón Arturo Michelena, Ateneo de Valencia, Carabobo State. Kenneth Armitage teaches a sculpture workshop in Caracas with Fernando Irazábal’s Participation. Exhibition Carlos Contramaestre: Los tumorales. Daniel González travels to San Francisco, California, USA and meets members of The Beat Generation, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Henry Miller among them.

289

Exhibition Daniel González at Bolles Gallery, San Francisco, California. Exhibition Daniel González at Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, California. Fernando Irazábal was awarded the María Eugenia Curiel Prize at XXIV Salón Oficial Annual de Arte Venezolano. Dámaso Ogaz settles in Paris. Publication of Dámaso Ogaz’s Los métodos y las deserciones imaginarias.

January: Adriano Gonzalez León and Mary Ferrero imprisoned. January 31: Exhibition Daniel González: Collages at Galería 40º a la Sombra, Maracaibo.

February: Juan Calzadilla and Edmundo Aray participate at Congreso Americano de Solidaridad Poética, Asociación de Periodistas de México, Mexico City. February 28: Publication of Salvador Garmendia’s Días de ceniza (Cal’s feuilleton).

March 31: In Brazil, military coup d’état against leftist president João Goulart succeeds.

April: Clandestine meeting of the PCV’s central committee which decides to stop urban attacks and focus on activities in rural environments. April 12: Exhibition Ángel Luque: Pinturas at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

August 24: Exhibition Vuelve la Ballena at Colegio de Economistas, Caracas August 24: Publication of Rayado sobre el Techo, no. 3.

August or September: Daniel González imprisoned.

October: Lt. Col. Michael Smolen, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the Venezuelan Air Force is taken hostage by the FALN and kept hidden in Ángel Luque’s studio. As a consequence of his involvement in the affair, Luque is deported to Spain.

1965 Publication of Salvador Garmendia’s Doble fondo (Ateneo de Caracas). Gabriel Morera is awarded a second grant at McDowell Foundation Colony, New Hampshire.

January 31: Exhibition Fernando Irazábal: Esculturas: construcción, destrucción at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

February 5: Exhibition Carlos Contramaestre: Tumorales at Galería 40º a la Sombra, Maracaibo.

290

March: Fernando Irazábal is awarded the Fundación Fina Gómez grant at XXVI Salón Oficial Annual de Arte Venezolano, and Universidad de Carabobo Prize at XXIII Salón Arturo Michelena. Also travels to Europe.

April 1: Exhibition Roberto Matta: La llave de los campos at Galería del Techo (Calle Real, Edificio Pacífico, Local “L”), Sabana Grande, Caracas. April 23: Exhibition Juan Calzadilla: Detrás de su doble at Galería El Pez Dorado, Caracas. April 28: Marine Corps enter Santo Domingo in the U.S.’s second occupation of the Dominican Republic.

May 9: Exhibition Óscar Pantoja: Cuadros de Pantoja at Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas. May 21: Exhibition Jorge Camacho: Historia del ojo. May 30: Exhibition Daniel González: Collages at Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

June 3: Military coup d’état in Santo Domingo against President Juan Bosch, the same day that U.S. withdraws its troops.

July: Exhibition Hugo Baptista: El sueñoverdugo at Ateneo de Caracas. July 4: Exhibition Jacobo Borges: Las jugadoras at Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas.

August 1: Exhibition Marcos Miliani: Sala del trono, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas. August 6: Exhibition Paolo Gasparini: Cómo son los héroes, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas.

September 7: Publication of Juan Calzadilla: Malos modales.

October 24: Exhibition Antonio Moya: El llano en el Techo.

November: Exhibition Ángel Luque: Dibujos, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas. November 14: Exhibition Antonio José Fernández: El hombre del anillo.

1966 Carlos Contramaestre is recognized with the Emil Friedman Prize at XXVII Salón Oficial Anual de Arte Venezolano. Francisco Pérez Perdomo is awarded the poetry award at the Bienal de Literatura José Rafael Pocaterra.

January 29: Exhibition Rogelio Polesello: Pinturas laicas, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas.

291

March 20: Group exhibition, La Ballena cierra el Techo, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas.

June 14: Publication of Francisco Pérez Perdomo”s La depravación de los astros (Universidad de Carabobo).

August: Exhibition, Antonio Moya: Notario de muerte, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.

October 20−November 10: Exhibition, Alberto Brandt: Falsarios eróticos, Galería El Puente, Caracas.

November 11: Exhibition, Hugo Baptista: Robos y exhibiciones, Galería El Puente, Caracas.

1967 Exhibition Juan Calzadilla: Los esclavos sublimados, Galería Nueva Generación, Caracas. Publication Adriano González León: Hombre que daba sed (Jorge Álvarez Editor, Buenos Aires). Dámaso Ogaz returned from Paris and permanently settles in Venezuela.

January: Screenplay for Pozo Muerto by Carlos Rebolledo, Edmundo Aray and Antonio de la Rosa published as a pamphlet.

April: In the VII Pleno del Comité Central del Partido Comunista de Venezuela, the PCV recognizes the defeat and begins the demobilization of armed groups. April 15: In the United States, 100,000 people follow Martin Luther King, Jr. in demonstrating against the Vietnam War outside the UN Building in New York City.

June: Exhibition, Testimonios, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas.

July 29: Exhibition, Carlos Contramaestre: Los confinamientos, Galería El Puente, Caracas. July 29: Caracas earthquake registers magnitude of 6.5 on the Richter scale causes extreme damage in the Altamira and Los Palos Grandes sections of the city.

August: Primer Encuentro Internacional de El Techo de la Ballena, Caracas. August: Group exhibition Ballenario, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas. August: Exhibition Siné: SinéBallena, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas. August: Exhibition Umberto Peña: Litografías, Galería del Techo, Sabana Grande, Caracas.

292

September 7: Opening for group exhibition Las contradicciones sobrenaturales, Galería Cruz del Sur, Caracas. September: Publication of Juan Calzadilla’s Las contradicciones sobrenaturales.

October 8: Ernesto “Che” Guevara is murdered by army troops in Bolivia. October 21: Exhibition, Chivo salvaje, Sala Gráfica Cruz del Sur, Caracas. October 21: Publication of Caupolicán Ovalles’ Elegía en rojo a la muerte de Guatimocín, mi padre, alias El Globo.

November: Publication of Dámaso Ogaz’s La ballena y lo majamámico.

December: Publication Las aguas vivas del Viet Nam, edited by Jorge Zalamea.

1968 Adriano González León wins Seix Barral’s Biblioteca Breve Prize, Barcelona, Spain. Publication of Edmundo Aray’s Tierra roja, tierra negra (Universidad de los Andes). Publication of Salvador Garmendia’s La mala vida in Montevideo.

January: Publication Carlos Contramaestre’s Cuatro argumentos para el reposo. January 19: Exhibition, Damaso Ogaz: Las majamámicas edípicas at Facultad de Arquitectura, UCV.

March: Publication of Ezequiel Saad’s Hablar con propiedad.

April 4: Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee leading to massive riots across the United States.

May: Publication of Edmundo Aray’s Cambio de soles (Universidad Central de Venezuela). May: Paris, France is confronted with unprecedented student and worker riots that culminate in a national strike that paralyzes the country. Other student demonstrations are organized in Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia.

June 26: In Rio de Janeiro, thousands of people gather in protest of the military dictatorship following the death of eighteen-year-old student Edson Luís de Lima Souto.

July: Publication of Salve, amigo, salve y adios, with texts by Edmundo Aray, Efraín Hurtado, Juan Calzadilla, Dámaso Ogaz, Xavier Domingo, Marcia Leyseca, Carlos Contramaestre and Tancredo Romero.

293

October 2: The Mexican Army fires at students gathered at Tlatelolco, killing several hundred.

November 22: Exhibition Hugo Baptista: Anotaciones, Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Eugenio Mendoza, Caracas.

December: Rafael Caldera (candidate for COPEI) is elected President. The PCV and MIR participate in the elections.

1969 Publication of Adriano González León’s País portátil (Seix Barral, Barcelona). Publication of Edmundo Aray’s Cuerpo de astronauta, convecino al cielo (Editorial Arte).

July 6: Exhibition, Carlos Contramaestre: personal exhibition, Galería La Gárgola de Tancredo, Maracaibo.

September: Exhibition, Juan Calzadilla: Los esclavos sublimados, Galería Logos, Maracaibo.

December: Publication of Carlos Contramaestre’s Armando Reverón, el hombre mono.

294

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BIOGRAPHY

Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, María C. Gaztambide is the Associate

Director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine

Arts, Houston. There she oversees Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino

Art, a digital archive and publications project that provides access to primary sources and critical documents tracing the development of twentieth-century art in Latin America and among Latino populations in the United States. For almost a decade, María has managed a network of over 150 scholars and specialists in sixteen cities throughout the Americas that, since 2004, have contributed content for this monumental digitization and publications project. At the MFAH, María also regularly collaborates in research, publication, and long- term exhibition initiatives that, in recent years, have included: Contingent Beauty:

Contemporary Art from Latin America (forthcoming, November 2015); Intersecting

Modernities: Latin American Art from the Brillembourg Capriles Collection (2013);

Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?, vol. I of the Critical Documents of

20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art series (2012); American Art & Philanthropy.

Twenty Years of Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2010); and Hélio

Oiticica: The Body of Color (2007). Previous professional experience includes field research projects for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

D.C., New York City, and Puerto Rico, as well as early involvement in the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan. María also holds M.A. degrees in Art History (Tulane

University) and Arts Administration (University of New Orleans).