John Fogarty Seminar “The Argentine Culture since the 70s” by Lucia Pacenza In 2003, I was invited by the Australian National University to create a work in their International Sculpture Park, which gave me an opportunity to be the first Argentine artist who could erect a work in the public space of Canberra. During more than a month, I shared my work with professors and students from the University School of Art, achieving the installation of the Arch of the Sun as it had been conceived (*). Such enriching experiences as this one should be more frequent. Little do we know in Argentina about the excellent Australian art and vice versa. I think that cultural interchange should increase to the benefit of both peoples. As Argentina integrates into the international current within the different circles, a more fluent dialogue with Australia would be interesting. Obtaining scholarships as those granted by the United States Guggenheim Foundation, participating in the region’s biennales such as the MERCOSUR, Sao Paulo and Habana ones, taking part in the European biennales held in Kassel and Venice, in art fairs as ARCO in Madrid, Art-Miami, etc, our culture shows its presence. We participate in language congresses as the one recently held in Mexico, in international museums’ meetings, in film festivals and those on theatre, music and all kinds of activities. The impact of modern communications on culture has been as overwhelming here as it is in the rest of the world. Most of our young people, students, scholars and artists master the language of the Internet, which has presently become vital to everyone involved in cultural activities. A look at the becoming of Argentine art over the last three decades reveals such an intense intellectual and artistic activity that I will be hardly able to summarise it here. For this reason, I will confine myself to the enumeration of some inevitable points in respect of our culture. To begin with, in literature, it is necessary to mention our best-known writer –among us as well as abroad-, Jorge Luis Borges, who, in one of his renown poems dedicated to Buenos Aires, wrote “it is not love that bonds us but fright, it will be for that reason that I want it so much”. He lived here and died in Geneva in 1986 (*). Borges’s work is the subject of study of Argentine and foreign universities; his prestige has gone beyond our borders, his books have been translated into all languages and he is an icon of literature, recognised and admired all over the world. Another of our internationally renowned writers, Julio Cortázar, lived in Paris since the 1950s and died there in 1984. His work, though, almost always refers to Argentina, as if he had been living side by side with the people of Buenos Aires. Adolfo Bioy Casares, Victoria Ocampo, Héctor Tizón, Ernesto Sábato are also outstanding exponents of our literature. Many good writers, some of whom were disappeared, as Haroldo Conti, others, who lived in exile, have later come back and coexist in this globalisation era with the light and commercial best-selling literature, which is what big publishing houses generally publish and sponsor. Fortunately, Argentine ones –one-time prestigious in Latin America– are publishing again after the recent economic crisis, making books affordable for the Argentine public. The National Library, situated in an emblematic building designed by architect Clorindo Testa, conserves and disseminates our literature, welcomes large numbers of people, and hosts conferences and book launches (*). Now, let us see: What role does the third millennium artist play? What are the limits of art? These questions –which are popular not only worldwide but also among us– were food for thought at the Biennale of the End of the World, recently held in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in Argentina. At present, a wide range of elements combines within plastic arts, not only paintings and sculptures, but also objects, videos, installations, photography, all of them either merged or in isolation. The generalised aesthetisation, globalisation, intermingling of languages, acceptance of the kitsch and of meaninglessness, are observed in many of the creations freely accomplished, approved by the critics and by the art market. In our medium, there is great freedom of speech, which enables different artistic manifestations to flourish. We can visit all kinds of exhibitions at museums and galleries for free. When approaching the recent history of our art, we can see that, after the sixties –characterised by experimentation and pop art–, conceptualism, understood as the art of ideas, lost interest in the practice of the pictorial métier. Yet, there was a return to painting with a realistic aesthetic in the mid seventies. Some of our most outstanding artists, for example, Antonio Berni (1905-1981), showed a realism that was critical of a technologically advanced society. His marginal characters, such as Juanito Laguna, are part of our social imaginary (*). With his powerful expressiveness, Carlos Alonso, painter and draughtsman, points at the dramatic reality of the contemporary individual (*). At the end of the sixties, four painters made up the New Figuration group, for whom the image of man appears distorted and fragmented. They are the late Jorge de la Vega and Ernesto Deira, together with Rómulo Macció and Luis Felipe Noe. These artists are still in vogue; they are admired by their creative freedom and hold exhibitions frequently. Antonio Seguí and other artists such as Ezequiel Linares and Carlos Gorriarena approached the expressionist new figuration. Rómulo Macció’s work shows, in a permanent development, different degrees of freedom reflected in his choice of topics as well as in his gesture strokes and use of colour (*). Libero Badii (1916-2001), one of the foremost representatives of Argentine sculpture, kept his work in constant evolution. He has his own museum in Buenos Aires, which opened some years before his death (*). Aldo Paparella (1920-1977), with his useless monuments made of painted cardboard, reflected the reality of his day. He contradicts the monuments’ idea of everlastingness and reveals the fragility of contemporary man (*). Juan Carlos Distéfano; his sculptures have shown social violence, censorship and the violation of human rights (*). The surrealist tendency has also been present in this period; we will only mention Roberto Aizemberg (1928-1995). Rather than participating in the surrealist tendency, his perfectionist painting is metaphysical (*). There are also exponents of abstract art, another tendency of the last decades: Since 1973, we find Alejandro Puente, whose paintings reveal a quest into Indo-American art (*). Ary Brizzi proposes a world of clarity, harmony between opposites and balance between the rational and the sensitive (*). Rogelio Polesello is a geometric art premier exponent with an endless repertoire of shapes (*). Maria J. Heras Velazco works with the rigour of industrial production, playing with imagination and sensitivity (*). In the eighties, postmodernism entails a return to an unpretentious painting that does not aim to innovate, using appropriations and quotes from the history of art. Coinciding with the idea of the end of ideology and globalisation, painting recovers after the heyday of conceptual art. In our country, the promotion of some artists took place abroad before it did here, an example of this is Guillermo Kuitca, who started his career at an early age, made forays into theatre, worked on scenography and on installations. His work is internationally valued; he lives in Buenos Aires, and has instituted a scholarship for young plastic artists (*). Clorindo Testa, painter and architect. His deeply personal work is characterised by the richness of solutions and absolute freedom (*). Also in the eighties, a quest to find the national identity is evident and social reality is exposed, as in the works of Víctor Quiroga, the artist from the province of Tucumán, and Diana Dowek (*). Adolfo Nigro and Carlos Delmonte are exponents of the River Plate movement (*). Since the sixties, there were several variants of conceptual art taking the social context as the subject matter of their works. Some of their foremost exponents are Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir and other artists belonging to the CAYC (Centre for Art and Communication) Group, since the nineteen seventies. Leon Ferrari, a pioneer of conceptual art in its political side, uses different elements as objects, installations, etc. His present paintings evoke calligraphy alphabets (*). Pablo Suarez (1937-2006) ironically represents some archetypical characters of the city, and their habits and customs in a very free-and-easy manner (*). Since the nineties, the use of computers brings about the incorporation of digital art, photography, video-art, video-installation, performances, objects, as well as plastic and conceptual languages which coexist in full freedom. As of the year 2000, all kinds of such visual experiences as photography, which has definitely become recognised as art, are included in official plastic art contests. Some of our photographers are Aldo Sessa, Alejandro Kuroptawa and Marcos Lopez. There is a revival of conceptual art, and we frequently find texts explaining the content of what we are looking at in an exhibition, to make its meaning clear. Public Art There are no laws allocating a budget percentage for the incorporation of works of art to new buildings in our country. Buenos Aires, endowed with so many beautiful nineteenth century works, lacks sculpture parks, and we rarely find contemporary pieces in its streets and walks, being Resistencia, a city in the province of Chaco, the only one which has devoted a prominent space to contemporary sculpture. Institutions In 1970, the Centro de Artes Visuales Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (Torcuato Di Tella Institute Visual Art Centre) closed down. It had been an emblematic institution of avant-garde art, whose director, critic Jorge Romero Brest, considered the death of painting a reality, on the grounds that it could not compete with the mass media for the audience’s attention.