On the face of the hippopotamus-like imperviousness of the “honorable public”...
On the face of the historian’s and the professor’s gloomy solemnity,
whose sheer touch mummifies everything on their path...”

Martín Fierro, magazine, 1924

As can be seen from this extract taken from the avant-garde Manifesto of the 20s, dissatisfaction with the institutions drove artists to engineer a mobilization towards the self-management of their discourse. Such an attitude shows frontal opposition to institutio-nally – mediated models such as critics and cultural operators in general.
Manifestos, magazines, letters to the editor in newspapers and other specialized media have been strategies shared by groups that have stood for different projects in their own times.
Art management, whether individual or collective, may resort to different modes, but they all have an underlying artistic discourse. Thus, the choices, timeliness and relevance implied in organizational, purely administrative activities are by no means alien to the aesthetic course the individual or the group imprints upon them.

Comisión Nacional de Bellas Artes

If we are to trace a genealogy of artist-managers, Eduardo Schiaffino stands out as a foundational paradigm. He was the first director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), a position which he reached at the apex of a process of the institutionalization of art to which he was committed from the very beginning.
An intellectual of the so-called Generation of the 80s, he intended to modernize, educate, and encourage a taste for art in a country that lacked art schools, art magazines, and even art museums. In 1876 he was co-founder of Sociedad Estímulo de Bellas Artes, a forerunner of our present-day art schools. In 1893, together with Severo Rodríguez Etchart, Eduardo Sívori, Ernesto de la Cárcova, Augusto Ballerini, Graciano Mendilaharzu, Angel Della Valle and others, Schiaffino founded El Ateneo, from where the first exhibitions of Argentinean art were organized. In 1895, after hard nego-tiations, a decree was passed for the creation of MNBA, with Schiaffino as director. In order to acquire a collection for the museum, he asked his painter friends to contribute works, and also persuaded collectors to donate their private collections and join in the adventure of supporting an art museum, a public space that, in Europe, dated back to the years before the French Revolution. Bent on increasing the collection, he made an official trip to Europe, where he bought ancient and contemporary paintings as well as plaster casts that would be used for teaching purposes.(1)

Schiaffino was also the first critic and art historian. For La Nación and other media of his time he wrote long reviews aimed at educating the public in matters of artistic taste. In his view, the arts were essential tools to build up a modern nation.

Ever since the first exhibition of MNBA’s works at the Bon Marché(2), now called Galerías Pacífico, Schiaffino’s profile as a curator became clearly defined. No doubt it was the profile of an artist. I quote:

“The fact of not owning suitable premises for the exhibition of its collections has forced the Governing Board to alter the chronological order of the works, opting for the lesser of two evils, since otherwise the works themselves would suffer. While it is true that the works have not been arranged in a given order, they have at least been hung in the light that best sets them off. This new criterion results
in a basic alteration of what is taken to be a universal practice, that is to say, arrangement by genre which, from both a theoretical and a practical standpoint, turns out to be the most coherent...”(3)

Unlike traditional chronological installations of European museums, the first art museum in our country followed a logical criterion stemming from art itself: that of assembling works by genre. The narrative was not to be arranged following the dictums of historical science, but would be unravelled in accordance with the subject-matter represented in the various works. This was a way to get round the obvious chro-nological and stylistic “potholes” in the collection while privileging the creation of a more favorable space for contemplation at the same time as innovation appeared on the scene.

As has been already pointed out, Schiaffino was an artist and, as such, his thought was grounded on the specificity of his field. Thus, one of the distinctive features of the management activities undertaken by artists was their creative nature, always ready to “take a leap”, to go in for change and to alter routines that other operators would only attempt after proper endorsement granted by the standards of their profession.

Within the complexity that is typically found in Latin-America, the said leaps were the way in which a number of social processes ocurred, starting from isolated factors introduced by members of the elites who staked their unyielding will or their undefeatable vocation. This happens to be the case with Schiaffino, who made it his goal to endow the field of art with the necessary conditions of existence by taking upon himself several roles, as a producer, a painter, a critic, an art historian and, eventually, a collector insofar as he built up the State’s official collection.(4)

Summing up, Schiaffino’s management overlies a project whose assumptions are grounded on a belief in art as a spiritual value, a growth factor and a source of benefit for all activities developed in a modern nation. Having drawn his model from Europe, he needed to implement such institutions as were typical of artistic development in the 19th century: exhibitions, prizes (salons), with the museum acting as the artist’s reassuring link to fame by way
of granting legitimacy to a narrative that dealt with national art.

Management for change

When dissatisfaction drives the artist to take upon himself a role that he deems has been vacated or improperly played by another social actor, the artist becomes an avant-gardist. He sets himself the task of rethinking the institution of art, “regarding the apparatus of art production and distribution as well as the notions on art that prevail at a given time and that rule reception of the works.”(5)

A reflexive attitude on his practice and on its social insertion places the artist in the position of an intellectual, that is, he becomes “an agent for the circulation of shared notions concerning social order in general and the order of his discipline in particular.” The intellectual, then, combines knowledge with explicit social responsibility regarding collective values within the society.(6)

On a level with institutions and in all cultural processes, Raymond Williams singles out
formations: effective movements and tendencies in artistic and intellectual life that exert a significant, even decisive influence upon the active development of a culture and that hold a changeable, sometimes concealed relationship with official institutions.” (7)

This is the space for management initiatives by artists; we shall see that the objectives vary in the cases under examination. There may be rupturists, together with others that will do only what is necessary to achieve public acknowledgement of such interests and aesthetics as are shared by the group they belong to. These organizations move “slantwise” with respect to the established norms, keeping –to different degrees in each case- already existing referential values as their starting-point.

These practices, which range from the production of art to its spreading, prompt jointly sustained artistic discourse. In a number of cases, management itself grows into a form
of artistic discourse.

Cultural formations are characteristic of complex, developed societies and, unlike institutions, fulfill an increasingly important role, as they involve a specialized praxis in the shape of organizations or self-organizations.

From the viewpoint of their external relationships, Williams classifies cultural formations as specializations, when they promote or support a particular medium, style or art; alternative, because these provide alternative means for the production or difussion of artwork rejected by institutions; and opposition or alternative when they are in open confrontation with ins-titutions and the systems that keep them going.

In the jargon of management, these groups are called think tanks: groups that generate and spread ideas with the aim of influencing politics and the social environment as a whole(8)

In one word, the artist-manager tries both to act independently and to squeeze into the winding paths of institutions; to jump over their manner of doing things in order to create new ways that he deems legitimate; to build up a circle of influences where the artist is the protagonist rather than the one mediators have chosen as a protagonist.

Collective management (of discourse) in the last few decades

The 60s: the cultural militant

At the opposite end of the institutionalizing endeavours of the Generation of the 80s, and after various historical processes that gave rise to sundry rupturist positions and to others that preferred to resort to tradition, the second half of the 60s brought discredit on and criticism of the refreshing optimism that the policy of “unimpeded economic development” had aroused. Reaction against the said policy es-calated after the coup d’état staged in 1966, giving rise to several actions in the field of culture. An example of this may be found in Tucumán Arde (1968), a collective piece that combined art with politics..

This experience was the product of the joint efforts of a self-organized group of artists from Buenos Aires, Rosario and Santa Fe.
They shared similar artistic backgrounds and, basically, they held a common view of the social moment. Their dissatisfaction with the way institutions behaved and conditioned the production of and response to art led them to gather together for the purpose of adopting suitable alternatives to put across their discourse in a more effective manner.

Thus, Tucumán Arde embodied many of the expectations entertained by the art of those years: the longing for experimentation, the will to have larger, participative audiences and, last but not least, a sense of identification between revolutionary politics and artistic avant-garde. In a way, it picked up the ideas posed by media art, an art manifesto produced by a group of artists and intellectuals related to Instituto Di Tella, “the” avant-garde institution.(9)

Mass media had proved their communicational and aesthetic potential. However, in Tucumán Arde the whole point was to use the media as powerful tools in an art for combat.(10). Together, artists and intellectuals made up an emergent figure of the times: that of the cultural militant.(11).

As Sigal points out, there is no dissociation between a cultural militant’s work and his political ideology. This is the meeting-point between poetics and politics. Renouncing institutional art circuits, which they blamed for trivializing and depleting avant-garde experiences of their shocking nature, those who supported these views decided to create an alternative circuit that would enable them to reach mass audiences; a place where their message did not end up being assimilated to a fad –the avant-garde novelty- and where it could enjoy the status of an effective practice aimed at social transformation. Thus they embarked on an experience grounded on Argentina’s political reality, joining the CGTA’s (Confederación Ge-neral de los Trabajadores de la Argentina) revo-lutionary proposal as this was a trade union that strongly opposed the policies devised by the military dictatorship.

The group travelled to the province of Tucumán with the purpose of inspecting the region’s dreadful social circumstances, which had come about as a consequence of a pilot plan through which the government attempted to reconvert its decaying industry. Regardless of the facts, official propaganda reported favorable changes in Tucumán and announced future advances, denying the statistics that, besides other critical aspects, reported high rates of unemployment and child mortality.

The team concealed their actual purpose and talked to the press about a would-be “cultural survey of the province”. In doing so they used the media to issue reports about their activities in Tucumán, and then gathered all the material they had collected and showed it as a counter-information circuit against the official discourse in an exhibition held on the CGTA union premises in Rosario and –for a very short time- in Buenos Aires too.(12).

Before carrying out the experience, artists from Rosario, Santa Fe, and Buenos Aires held discussion meetings, organized a series of experimental art activities and, finally, the Encuentro Nacional de Arte de Vanguardia, the theoretical support for the Tucumán Arde experience.

Management included aspects such as fund raising to pay for travelling expenses, agreements with trade unions to gain access to factories and interview workers there, contacts with Tucumán’s cultural authorities, division of labour to process the data yielded by field-work and, having done all this, the final pre-paration of reports and manifestos on which the artistic- and -political discourse of the experience was grounded.

As is often the case with artists’ organizations, the group’s legacy consisted of a large corpus of thought about art and its historical circums-tance, but it failed to establish itself as a continous alternative in time. After Tucumán Arde and the different stages it involved (field work, exhibition and conclusions) the group faded out. Internal disagreement and opposite views about the kind of action to be taken caused internal division in the organization and structure they had planned and, after dissension, what was left was a number of sub-groups that went on operating along the same lines for a couple of years.

Exposición de Juan Carlos Romero en el CAYC, Bs. As.

Instituto Di Tella, a model institution for the management of a cultural project and the de-cade’s bustling centre that fostered moderni-zation of artistic languages, was closed down in 1970. In fact, the Institute had been the first organic undertaking devoted to corporative sponsoring in our milieu.(13)

In 1968, capitalizing on some of the management characteristics of the Di Tella, art critic and entrepreneur Jorge Glusberg founded the Centro de Estudios de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), which organized encounters between artists and their foreign colleagues and held seminars and discussion groups with the parti-cipation of well-known intellectuals. The Centre sought the collaboration of artists, scientists, sociologists, and psychologists.

Where as from a structural point of view CAYC should necessarily be labelled as an institution, it looked more like an independent formation owing to the flexibility it showed when welcom-ing alternative contents and adopting avant-garde management functions and strategies, at least over the first few years.

Its experimental profile was defined in 1969, when it organized an exhibition entitled Arte y Cibernética that dealt with computerized art, only one year after practically the same participants had taken part in the Cybernetic Seren-dipity exhibition staged by the London avant-garde Institute for the Contemporary Arts.

In 1971 the Grupo de los Trece(14), is set up by a heterogeneous group of artists that respond to Glusberg’s call with the purpose of reflecting on the issues proposed by the institution. As a matter of fact, many of them had participated in its activities as independent contributors. They implemented an innovative methodology, quite fashionable in those times, based on team work, a model borrowed from the sciences and from company management. Weekly meetings, where the group discussed art and management tasks, were accurately recorded in the corresponding minutes.

An exhibition untitled Arte de Sistemas and staged in Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art lay the foundations:

“One of the most outstanding characteristics of Latin –American artists’ work lies in the fact of its determination to encompass regional issues within its subject-matters: through working with an international language, conceptual art is bent on outlining the par-ticular realities of the context in which these artists live and on which they nourish”(15)

El Arte de Sistemas exhibited processes rather than finished products. Its proposal was that the spectator should be involved in grasping the systems ruling the issues and experiences of the last quarter of the century by having access to mass reproduction art made of “poor” materials: some kind of serial work, easy to display and to transport. This tendency deve-loped in a number of exhibitions whose logistics consisted in asking foreign artists to send an original contribution by post, prestandardized in a given format, with diagrams, drawings and photographs, that would be then reproduced and exhibited in Buenos Aires at a very low cost. The exhibitions held in Buenos Aires with the participation of reputed members of the international avant-garde movement were then taken to other cities. To a certain extent, the success of this methodology was due to the po-ssibility of capitalizing on the anti-institutional, alternative standing that, in those times, CAYC shared with similar art centres already existing in European and American capital cities.

As a strategy of discourse management, Arte de Sistemas attempted to reverse the course leading to legitimization of Argentinean art in those years. Rather than inviting artists and curators to meet their Argentinean colleagues with a view to integrate them into contemporary foreign scenarios, CAYC, at a reasonable cost, opted for gathering together the works done by both Argentineans and foreigners, promoting them within an alternative circuit so that the tendency could later be installed
in the mainstream.(16)

Exhibitions like Arte de Sistemas II. Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano propose art as a component “not only of an ideology but also of politics, morality, law and custom”(17). Thus, in early 1972, international
critique acknowledged the specificity of Argentinean artists together with their contributions to conceptual art, and named it ideological conceptualism. (18)

CAYC acted as a sphere where artists and intellectuals involved themselves in exchanges and updates. It worked as a para-institutional organization whose programme intended to find a place for Argentinean art within the Latin-American context and, once there, project it onto the international scene. It was intent on breaking with cultural dependence -so much theorized about in those times- from the generation of an art dealing with specific issues and means of circulation so that it made room for our contemporary artists. According to the Centre’s letter of intent, it was not in-terested in competing with the market’s traditional operators by encouraging the creation of marketable objects. This is why emphasis was laid on experimental art, on its distinctive features, closely linked to life, so that the community would be able to appropriate it..

Towards the mid-70s, of the original thirteen members of the group, only nine remained. What with exile, indulging in personal views, political disagreement or changes in the group’s dynamics, it cannot be denied that it is most difficult to uphold a collective discourse that may, at the same time, satisfy individual aspirations, even more so when the ever-changing Latin-American reality was going through one of its darkest moments: the comeback of dictatorial regimes.

Under the name of CAYC Group(19), the group went on working on historical issues in undertones that moderated any explicit ideological load and gave way to a more poetic, connotative vision. In 1977, it achieved fame in the greater circuit when it won the Great Itamaraty Prize at XIV San Pablo Biennal with their installa-tion entitled Signos en ecosistemas artificiales.

The 80s: collective art for the recovery of human values

With the return to democracy, several political calls issued by Human Rights organizations were accompanied by aesthetic actions undertaken by artists such as those gathered in C.A.P.A.T.A.C.O (Colectivo de Arte Participativo Tarifa Común) or GAS.TAR (Grupo de Artistas Socialistas por la Transformación) These groups made posters, urban interventions and performances with the purpose of showing the extent of the genocide. An example of this kind of work was the 1983 Siluetazo(20), an urban setting that turned the city’s civic centre intoa large collective workshop where dramatic images were produced and then scattered round Plaza de Mayo and glued on to nearby buildings: these images were the silhouettes of those who had been arrested and remained missing during the military dictatorship.

“Torture tears up the body; irrational exploit-ation of nature breaks ecologic balance; unem-ployment, starvation, and the impossibility to make headway destroy the will to live; fear of freedom dispels the possibility of change; skepticism breaks faith in the future; the indifference of the mighty shreds the dignity of those who are not; savage individualism demolishes any project of unity. It is in this society torn to pieces that the aesthetics of rubble arises: Escombros.”
“ We are an open, horizontal group. We do not have either a fixed or a limited number of members. All of us, without exception, have the right to decide and to voice our opinion. Escombros comes to life, dies,
and is reborn, endlessly.”

In 1995, well into the changes brought about by the Menem era, Escombros issues its second manifesto: "La estética de la solidaridad”, where the group denounces the ruling economic model “characterized by social exclusion.”

So far, and with varying degrees of intensity, Escombros has moved within the participative scheme from where it originated..

The 90s: diagnosis and treatment

In the early nineties, after the second democratic Presidential election, and having obser-ved some of the limitations that the first de-mocratic administration following the dictatorship had not been able to overcome, a group of artists from Córdoba -or residing in Córdoba- together with others from other provinces and from Buenos Aires decided to meet in order to discuss the functioning of art institutions and their own role as producers inside the institutions and in the society as a whole.

Producers, educators, audiences, mediators and institutions –in other words, every single component of the cultural field as a body- were subjected to rigorous analysis. The diagnosis agreed that the situation was critical: a “state of emergency” which called for collective action and solidarity if that injured body was to be cured.
“We wish to re-establish communication bet-ween ourselves and audiences, to become a part of the social environment, to let people know about our needs and opinions.”
“We wish ENCUENTRO EN LA CUMBRE to be acknowledged as a starting-point for the generation of projects and actions aimed at divulging national art. We, as participants, commit ourselves to provide the kind of organization that will further the right kind of management for such goals to be achieved.” “The net and net-work. Unlike a ‘service’ or an ‘organization’, the net is a ‘tool’. In the first two cases, the user plays a passive role. This tool named net is the thread that weaves bonds among human beings, gaining them access to a whole series of information items that might be called “instruments for growth”(22)

Encuentro en la Cumbre I (Dec. 12-16, 1990) gathered 300 artists from all over the country in the village lying on the hills of Córdoba.(23)

The panels and discussions focused on:
1. Awareness of the cultural field as a body, professionalism, social insertion:"all of us artists (...) compose a powerful cultural body, able to develop a strategy and to claim our own space”; 2. Relationships with critics and marchands, claiming more commitment with the poetics and the production process from both kinds of operators ; 3. Identity: to aspire to a thesis of non-hegemonic identity resulting from a juncture between artists’ values and
values upheld by society in general; 4. Spread of visual arts in society: to foster the spreading of visual artistic activity, for little or nothing was being done about it; 5. The future of art: in the face of an “art without objectives”, pervaded by post-modernistic tendencies, to discuss the bases for critical art; 6. Analysis of the artist’s situation: having diagnosed a high degree of individualism and isolation, they propose to create solidarity bonds by means of active communication;7. Trade Union affairs: owing to a lack of effective official policies in the field of culture, various legal alternatives to protect the profession were discussed.(24)

The composition of the organizing group shows that different generations and diverse artistic experiences participated in the event. In some way, the encounter mirrored the actual compo-sition of the producers’ community. The teams examined the state of affairs in every one of the institutions connected to the field: schools, salons, museums and cultural legislation.(25)

El II Encuentro, -denominado  Encuentro Nacional de Artistas Plásticos,  tuvo lugar en San Juan en 1992 y se planteó como prioridad "implementar los mecanismos para pasar de las ideas y propuestas elaboradas (...) a su realización ".

Like in the previous encounter, different commissions were created to carry out the work. In part, the development of a database containing information about artists and institutions connected net-wise among themselves and the discussion of inclusion mechanisms for artists through the creation of laws and norms regulating their activity were a few of the most important objectives. Besides housing the commissions, auditoriums and several public places provided spaces for performances, exhibitions, and concerts.

Overshadowed by the ghost of bureaucratization, this group only managed to hold a second encounter -II Encuentro-, thus failing to channel their heterogeneity so as to carry out a long-term management project.(26) However, many of the ideas on record in the minutes taken down du-ring the encounters were carried out by diffe-rent managers over a full decade. An example of this is the fact that Fundación Antorchas developed various programmes to train artists and museum professionals from the interior of the country, while it also granted scholarships for production projects in a number of disciplines, including the electronic arts.

The said Encuentros arrived at their diagnosis immediately after the 1989 hyperinflationary crisis. The ensuing economic stability allowed for greater reactivation in the field, and then projects like the one regarding free circulation of art pieces and the patronage law became drafts for Parliament to consider.

What is the present context for initiatives?

Culture cannot escape the general characteristics of a phenomenon that is best expressed in the economy: i.e. globalization. Although culture is indeed affected by globalization, it enjoys a rather particular standing, as current social studies have pointed out. While it is true that technological revolution and global markets have spiralled circulation of cultural goods to an unprecedented scale, it is no less true that such processes do not suffice to even start talking about homogeneization of either production or consumption. Theoreticians agree that the conditions of existence for a single global culture are not given, but that a civilizing matrix can be consolidated, the “world-modernity” that each country updates, adapts or alters in accordance with its own history.(27)

Along these lines, identities emerging from this matrix are not unitary, focused referents. As Néstor García Canclini has pointed out, it is no longer possible to speak of national cultural identities. It used to be, but in the 20s, 60s, and 70s, when cultural processes were taken to be closely related to nationality but, as from the 80s, the transnational conditions that regulate the production, circulation, and reception of art have dramatically changed the scene. Transnationalization, interculturization, deterritorialization and hybridation are all cultural phenomena that bring to light the tension between integration and differentiation.

Thus, the cultural network, viewed as an open structure, a multiplier of signs in permanent movement, intersection and mutation, brings forth organizations that, aware of the situation, opt for joining a broad multicultural spectrum.

It would seem as if, in order to function pro-perly, it were necessary to have a clear notion of the organization’s “place in the world” and of the organizational culture it puts in act. The knowledge of past modes and customs and the evaluation of performance is what enables organizations to grow further. Still, this kind of acquired learning should reach beyond the people, beyond the managers that put it into practice, and this puts the
very notion of group to the test. Unlike other organizations, the ones composed by artists cannot be built on the mere intention to meet common needs. It surely feeds on empathy, friendship, individual commitment, aesthetic agreements and ways of negotiating meanings that are so constrained by present-day connotations as to become vulnerable to the passing of time. All this hinders continuity.
Throughout history, most non-formal art associations have been either ephemeral or short-lived. Aware of it or not, when they perceive the risk of losing the initial contents that brought them into being, organizations will either break up or fade out.

Management as strategy consists in carrying out ideas, resources, placing people within an in-ternal, coherent framework so that external de-mands can be met. Unless internal coherence is protected, the organization cannot but break up.

According to Ernesto Gore, management “is never about assembling together a known model; it always demands an effort from us so that we may understand reality and respond to it.” (28)

The various groups that we have mentioned in this paper started from an understanding of reality by means of more or less formal diagnoses about the functioning of institutions.

After some previous initiatives, in early 2000 Claudia Fontes, Leonel Luna and Pablo Ziccarello created Trama: “a space for discussion and research to enhance artistic practice.”

The true importance of such projects becomes apparent when official institutions hardly promote exchange. “El surmenage de la muerta”, a cultural magazine founded immediately fo-llowing Trama, mentions a similar view as its editorials speak of the “neglect of people” that the Argentinean State exercised during the past decade.

Trama defines itself as a programme that seeks some institutional support, always bearing in mind how important it is for it to remain a formation, adapting management to needs through short-term programmes and constant evaluation.(29).

Independently of whether it may or may not last in time, the construction of collective thought plays the role of an operational utopia for the management of discourse. Efforts will be renewed and actions will be performed if, and only if, the utopia remains at work.

Art exhibitions, understood as spaces where the meanings of art are handled, are seen as powerful devices for the writing of history, and this is the reason why artists will not renounce their active participation in the staging process.

When the discourse of art was in the hands of institutions, and all other actors were excluded from it, it gave rise to problems that artists as critics have extensively discussed. The possibility of cre-ating networks seems
to be a better choice to foster collective, in-dependent action; a better choice, definitely, than allowing art to depend on government officials appointed by the political administration in power at the different moments.

(1) At present, these casts are in the museum standing next to Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes “Ernesto de la Cárcova”, in Costanera Sur.

(2) Built in 1889 by Ernesto Agrelo, the Bon Marché was an elegant, sophisticated shopping arcade resembling its Parisian namesake. It housed shops, art galleries, artists’ workshops, halls, and a library.

(3) “Bedaecker de la República Argentina”, c. 1900. The document is to be found in the Schiaffino Archives, MNBA.

(4) Bernardo Subercaseaux points out that both enlightened elites and intellectuals were in charge of articulating foreign countries’ thought with Latin-America. This is how tendencies rising from specific, European
historical processes, depleted from the organicity of their places of origin, were introduced into Latin America. However, the phenomenon should not be seen as a mere epigone, since it stands for special features where what is local and what comes from abroad becomes integrated into a process of “cultural appropriation” through which identity is defined. Subercaseaux, Bernardo: La apropiación cultural en el pensamiento latinoamericano in
Centro Wilfredo Lam, Visión del Arte Latinoamericano. In the 80s, PNUD/UNESCO, Lima, 1994..

(5) Burger, Peter: Teoría de la vanguardia, Barcelona, Ediciones Península, 1987.

(6) Sigal, Silvia: Intelectuales y poder en la década del sesenta, Buenos Aires, Puntosur, 1991, p. 19.

(7) Williams, Raymond: Marxismo y Literatura, Barcelona, Península, 1997, pp. 139-141. In English in the original (T.N.)

(8) Ernesto Gore: El museo como organización in “Lo público y lo privado en la gestión de museos”, Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica/FNA/ Fundación Antorchas, 1999.

(9) In the 60s, various experiences that used the mass media as artistic material for their experimentation went by the name of media art. Along these lines, Roberto Jacoby, Raúl Escari and Eduardo Costa wrote a manifesto for their “First piece of media art” in which they revealed the type of manipulation that the media may produce. In order to prove their point, these artists set out to fake a piece of news -for they maintained that
“derealization” of objects is characteristic of the media when it comes to circulating information-and to go through with it to the last consequences. They falsely informed the press about a happening they had supposedly held; the press circulated the news and then, in the next phase of the same operation, they belied it. This is how readers experienced a reality generated by language –the news they believed to be true- while it was proved that the “social existence” of facts and objects might well be an effect of communication phenomena. Sociologist Eliseo Verón and art critic Oscar Massota also played an active part in the conceptual production of the piece. See Herrera, María José: La experimentación con los medios masivos de comunicación en la Argentina de la década del 60 in Premio Telefónica de Argentina a la Investigación en Historia de las Artes Plásticas, Buenos Aires, FIAAR/Telefónica de Argentina, 1997. In English and italics in the original (T.N.)

(10) Declaración de Tucumán Arde, Buenos Aires. Roberto Jacoby, who created the “media art” genre together with E. Costa and Raúl Escari, was one of the creators of Tucumán Arde, though his signature did not appear on the final document.

(11) See Silvia Sigal: “Intelectuales y poder en la década del sesenta” , Buenos Aires; Puntosur, 1991

(12) Tucumán Arde was composed of Ma. E. Arechavala, B. Balbé, G. Borthwick, A. Bortolotti, G. Carnevale, J. Cohen, R. Elizalde, N. Escandell, E. Favario, L. Ferrari, E. Ghilioni, E. Giura, Ma. T. Gramuglio, M. Greiner, R. Jacoby, J. Ma. Lavarello, S. López Dupuy, R. Naranjo, D. De Nully Braun, R. Pérez Cantón, O. Pidustwa,
E. Pomerantz, R. Puzzolo, J. P. Renzi, J. Rippa, N. Rosa, C. Schork, N. De Schork, D. Sapia, R. Zara. Margarita Paksa, Pablo Suárez and Ricardo Carreira were mentors of the project but did not participate in the actual works.
All these artists were from Rosario, Santa Fe or Buenos Aires.

(13) Instituto Di Tella was funded by Argentinean company Siam-Di Tella and received subsidies from American Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

(14) This group was composed of Jacques Bedel, Luis Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Jorge Glusberg, Carlos Guinzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero,
Julio Teich and Horacio Zabala. Towards 1975 the group undergoes some changes, and it chooses to be called CAYC, with ten members: Jacques Bedel, Luis Benedit, Jorge Glusberg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir,
Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alfredo Portillos and Clorindo Testa..

(15) They also declared that “there is no art that could be properly called Latin-American, but the region does have distinctive issues of its own, consistent with the revolutionary stage it is undergoing.” CAYC press-
release, GT-129, 6/12/72.

(16) This alternative circuit was composed of Mail Art artists. Several international and Argentinean artists adhered to the dynamics, since they regarded the post as a democratic way to further spread their ideas in a manner that was not subject to traditional institutions. In English in the original (T.N.)

(17) Press-release, Gt-119-11 on 4/21/72, Buenos Aires, CAYC.

(18) The name was coined by historian and critic Simón Marchan Fiz (Del Arte Objetual al arte de concepto, Madrid; Alberto Corazón Editor, 2ª, 1974. Chapter II, item IV) after the exhibitions staged by Grupo de
los Trece in the 70s. Still, forerunners of the tendency can be found as early as the times of media art and other experiencies of political art carried out in the 60s. Nevertheless, various European and American art histories record Arte de Sistemas as the single Argentinean original contribution to an international tendency.

(19) While it is true that Grupo de los Trece emerged and functioned under the aegis of CAYC, its name somehow referred, in a neutral manner, to the gathering of thirteen artists and their occasional or recurrent guests. The change of name no doubt endows the group with a clearly institutional nature so, as a natural consequence, the group stands for everything an institution denotes and connotes.

(20) The authors were Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Guillermo Kexel and Julio Flores. The performance took place in Plaza de Mayo and was part of the 3rd Walk for Resistance, called by SERPAJ and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (September 20th-21st, 1983)

(21) Some of the members of Escombros had been involved in groups related to CAYC.

(22) Encuentros en la cumbre, s/l (Buenos Aires, s/d (1991), internal paper.

(23) ORGANIZERS. Miguel Ocampo, Luis Wells, Gustavo Grünig, Emma Gargiulo, Bettina Muraña, Jorge Peirano, Angelines Sáenz, Julia Alurralde, Eduardo García Sáenz, Edward Pearson, Luz Reynal, Liliana Wells, P. Capdevilla, Solange Bunge, Richard Bunge, José María Suhurt, Wilberd Morales, Gabriela Zalazar, from Buenos Aires Blanca Carusillo, Ricardo Roux. HONORARY COMMITTEE. Carlos Alonso, Raúl Alonso, Luis Fernando Benedit, Remo Bianchedi, Ricardo Carpani, Américo Castilla, Miguel Dávila, Nicolás García Uriburu, Enio Iommi, Kenneth Kemble, Carlos de la Mota, Adolfo Nigro, Luis Felipe Noé, Pedro Pont Vergés, Alejandro Puente, Juan Pablo Renzi, Pablo Suárez, Clorindo Testa. In Encuentros en la cumbre. 1er Encuentro Nacional de Artistas Plásticos, Córdoba, 1990, leaflet.

(24) Encuentros en la cumbre, Fiesta, s/l (buenos Aires), s/d (1991), leaflet. 

(25) In this last respect, special attention was given to the consideration of a law of free circulation of artwork, a differentiated regime for the ale and purchase of art pieces, exemption of estate duties for Argentinean
cultural goods, fostering cultural sponshorship from private sources, and the self-insurance National Law. See Castilla, Américo: Medidas legislativas para a mejor realización de una política de estímulo a las artes visuales, 1990/92, unpublished, author’s archives.

(26) “we are thinking of going on creating, going on questioning, without becoming a stable, bureaucratic, trade-unionist agency torn by struggles for power and for executive positions. This is exactly what we are striving
to avoid, even if it means disappearing. We prefer this marginal status, while we keep “bothering” through these encounters. (...) Politicians are full of shortcomings, but they are not stupid; it is well-known that we are an important group of pressure.” El Nuevo Diario. Universidad y Sociedad, San Juan, Friday, April 3, 1992, p. 20. Interview to Américo Castilla and Ricardo Roux.

(27) Ortiz, Renato. Globalización/mundialización in Carlos Altamirano (editor). Términos críticos de sociología de la cultura, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2002.

(28) Gore, op. cit. p. 48.

(29) . The following institutions support Trama: Fundación Espigas, Fundación Antorchas, and the Dutch Ministrry of Foreign Affairs/Cooperation for development. It is also a member of RAIN Artist’ Initiatives Network