{"id":5743,"date":"2015-02-09T16:36:04","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T16:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=5743"},"modified":"2019-11-19T20:37:12","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T20:37:12","slug":"dead-boars-viruses-and-zombies-roberto-jacobys-art-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=5743","title":{"rendered":"Dead Boars, Viruses, and Zombies: Roberto Jacoby’s Art History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014)<\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n
\"<\/a>
Roberto Jacoby, El alma nunca piensa sin imagen<\/em> (The Soul Never Thinks without an Image), 2010,<\/strong> detail of installation being covered by organizers, Pavilh\u00e3o Ciccillo Matarazzo, 29th Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo (artwork and photograph \u00a9 Robert Jacoby)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unless otherwise indicated, translations from the Spanish are by the author.<\/p>\n

The subtlest of deceptions lies in wait in a \u201c1000 Words\u201d feature on Roberto Jacoby in the March 2011 issue of Artforum<\/em>.1<\/a><\/sup> Among the article\u2019s accompanying illustrations is a photograph of a seated, shirtless man dressed as a satyr, with horns and a fake beard. It is identified as documentation of one of the foundational conceptualist works in Argentina: Eduardo Costa, Ra\u00fal Escari, and Jacoby\u2019s Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em> (Happening for a Dead Boar), 1966. Reports of a Happening that never actually happened were distributed to newspapers and magazines, with the artists revealing their hoax in the same publications two months later.2<\/a><\/sup> If there was a Happening, it consisted of the mass reception of the news stories. The project inaugurated a new genre, arte de los medios de comunicaci\u00f3n<\/em> (media art), in which both art objects and events would no longer be necessary. Instead, works of art would subsist entirely within the mass media, existing as information circulated via newspapers, television, or other channels of communication.3<\/a><\/sup> In his 2011 \u201c1000 Words,\u201d Jacoby connects this early project to his contemporary work, garnering valuable attention for both in a major international art magazine. The photograph in question, however, is incorrectly captioned. In the exhibition catalogue for Jacoby\u2019s recent retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda in Madrid, a cropped version of the same image is identified as a detail of the 2010 \u201cmaterialization\u201d of the 1966 work\u2014forty-four years after the original.4<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

This microfiction is buried in supplemental information, the accuracy of which is easily taken for granted. If the error was indeed planted by Jacoby when he supplied the magazine with publishable images, it is of a different nature than the hoax at the center of Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em>, which the artists made public. In this case, research is required to excavate the mistake. Once unveiled, however, it similarly calls attention to the magazine as a mediating factor\u2014to Artforum<\/em>\u2019s operations as a tastemaker for global contemporary art. The magazine did not report on Jacoby\u2019s 1960s experiments when he was producing them, but amid the recent surge of interest in postwar Latin American art, he has been (re)covered as a contemporary artist in close dialogue with his past work.5<\/a><\/sup> It is precisely now, at this unique moment of visibility, that Jacoby plants a seed of doubt. What does it mean to have Artforum<\/em>\u2019s stamp of approval\u2014can the magazine be relied on to get the record straight? Indeed, what would the \u201cstraight\u201d record even look like? The caption, after all, is not merely erroneous; it instantiates a collapse of present onto past.<\/p>\n

\"Nicol\u00e1s<\/a>
Nicol\u00e1s Guagnini and Roberto Jacoby, \u201c1000 Words: Roberto Jacoby Talks about El alma nunca piensa sin imagen<\/em> (The Soul Never Thinks without an Image), 2010,\u201d<\/strong> page 250 from Artforum International<\/em> 49, no. 7, March 2011 (page \u00a9 Artforum International; photograph by Rosana Schoijett)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What follows is a consideration of Jacoby\u2019s career that attends to his periodic manipulations of art-historical truth, which have ranged between highly visible and nearly imperceptible gestures. My contention is that from his earliest work through the present day, Jacoby has understood art history, with its organization of facts, dates, and credit, as fair game for intervention and alteration. At times (as in the example above) this has rendered his mass-media and institutional contexts more conspicuous, while questioning the claims of experiential or political authenticity that are frequently attached to Latin American art both past and present. Yet the stakes of this project do not only bear on the wider dissemination of his work today. Artists in Jacoby\u2019s mid-1960s Buenos Aires milieu were preoccupied with their own history even as it unfolded, systematically problematizing authorship, assertion, and documentation. As his recent work has reflected on this era, Jacoby has made pointed references to the interdisciplinary cultural critic Oscar Masotta, a close colleague and mentor of the media-art group. Masotta, who played with minute disjunctions and fictions in the service of his unique approach to \u201capperception,\u201d is at the center of an erotics of influence that Jacoby has gradually constructed over the last decade. Any contemporary consideration of Jacoby, and Argentine conceptualism more generally, would do well to take his alternative art history and its implications into account.<\/p>\n

From Self-Promotion to Apperception<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jacoby\u2019s emergence as an artist coincided with a larger crossroads for Argentina. The country had emerged from the 1950s under the spell of developmentalism, which brought rapid industrialization and the information age in short shrift. Funded by the Di Tella family\u2019s manufacturing wealth, the Instituto Torcuato di Tella provided a centralized venue for the new experimental practices of the decade, supporting artists through prize competitions and group exhibitions that traveled to international venues.6<\/a><\/sup> Amid this cultural efflorescence, the country was politically unstable. Led by the officers who had overthrown president Juan Domingo Per\u00f3n in 1955 and banned his political party, the military closely monitored elected officials for signs of communist sympathies. Democracy was suspended in 1962 and dispensed with altogether in 1966, when a junta was installed that would remain in power into the early 1970s. Under General Juan Carlos Ongan\u00eda, intellectuals and youth were particular targets, as when soldiers invaded the Universidad de Buenos Aires and beat up faculty and students who were occupying school buildings in the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat\u2019s immediate aftermath.7<\/a><\/sup> The Di Tella remained a refuge for artistic experimentation, however, so long as political statements were coded rather than explicit.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Alberto<\/a>
Alberto Greco, Vivo-Dito Vac\u00edo<\/em> (Empty Vivo-Dito), 1963,<\/strong> Madrid (artwork and photograph \u00a9 The Greco Family)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the early years of the decade, Alberto Greco pioneered a self-promotional, expressionist brand of action art that later artists like Jacoby would strip of its shock and references to the body. Greco traveled extensively in Europe and learned of international trends such as Nouveau R\u00e9alisme. What Kaira Caba\u00f1as has called the \u201cperformative realism\u201d of Yves Klein and others informed Greco\u2019s works and publicity stunts.9<\/a><\/sup> When he returned to Argentina in 1958 as an \u201cinformalist\u201d and painted some of the country\u2019s first monochromes, he apparently urinated on some of the canvases, as if territorially marking this imported convention.10<\/a><\/sup> He made light of his geographical origin and artistic ambitions in a series of street posters reading \u201cAlberto Greco: El pintor informalista m\u00e1s importante de Am\u00e9rica\u201d (America\u2019s Most Important Informalist Painter) and \u201cAlberto Greco: \u00a1\u00a1Qu\u00e9 grande sos!!\u201d (How Great You Are!!), in 1961. The posters can be read as both serious authorial claims and jokes. By this time he had rejected informalism, rendering competition with any other such painters, American or otherwise, a lost cause. Greco\u2019s marveling at his own \u201cgreatness\u201d could certainly be taken as further self-mockery, if not for his subsequent Vivo-Dito<\/em> works, 1962, in which various objects and people in public space were circled and signed by the artist. The Vivo-Ditos<\/em> imply the possibility of nominating all the world\u2019s people and things as his work, which obviously comes into conflict with similar gestures by other artists, past, present, or future, to do the same.11<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Greco died in 1965, the year that variations on Pop art began to appear in Buenos Aires. A new generation of artists closely supported by the Di Tella drew on Greco\u2019s self-promotional stunts, as when Edgardo Gim\u00e9nez, Dalila Puzzovio, and Carlos Squirru appeared on a billboard on the corner of Avenida Viamonte and Calle Florida in Buenos Aires. Grinning beneath the tagline \u201c\u00bfPor qu\u00e9 son tan geniales?\u201d (Why are they such geniuses?), the artists resembled actors in an advertisement (and the billboard was indeed coproduced by the Meca advertising agency).12<\/a><\/sup> Gim\u00e9nez, Puzzovio, and Squirru preen alongside their own assemblage works of the period, the implication being that the artworks answer the question at hand. As with Greco\u2019s \u201chow great you are,\u201d however, this is a genius borne by the question itself; they are \u201cso brilliant\u201d because the billboard asserts as much on the way to asking why. If this is a campy send-up of advertising, it nonetheless still functions as self-promotion.<\/p>\n

\"Edgardo<\/a>
Edgardo Gim\u00e9nez, Delia Puzzovio, and Carlos Squirru, \u00bfPor qu\u00e9 son tan geniales?<\/em> (Why are they such geniuses?), 1965, <\/strong> advertising billboard, installation view, corner of Viamonte and Florida, Buenos Aires, 1965 (artwork \u00a9 Edgardo Gim\u00e9nez, Delia Puzzovio, and Carlos Squirru; photograph provided by Edgardo Gim\u00e9nez)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pop also inspired Masotta\u2019s first writings on art. Already established as a literary critic for journals such as Contorno<\/em> in the prior decade, Masotta discovered Jacques Lacan\u2019s writings in the early 1960s.13<\/a><\/sup> Shortly after, he declared himself a \u201cstructuralist\u201d who aimed to introduce Argentine intellectuals to trends in international theory.14<\/a><\/sup> First delivered in September 1965 and published in 1967, Masotta\u2019s lectures on Pop art exemplify his creative approach to reporting on international culture, in this case the works of Andy Warhol, George Segal, and others. In the introduction to the book version of El \u201cpop-art,\u201d<\/em> he confesses to not having seen the works he lectured on in person, but only through magazine and news\u00adpaper articles (some of the book\u2019s illustrations still have captions visible from the original sources from which they were directly reproduced).15<\/a><\/sup> This perhaps contributed to his sense that such works are not so much \u201cabout\u201d their message\u2014news events, celebrities, products\u2014as the conditions that make mass communication possible, which he terms codigo<\/em>, or \u201ccode.\u201d For Masotta, Pop artists find ways to draw attention to code over message, breaking up the legibility of the popular image so that its code can be perceived and comprehended.16<\/a><\/sup> Of Warhol\u2019s repetitions, for example, he writes, \u201cHis multiplications do not pretend to express<\/em>, but, I would say, to signify<\/em> . . . that is that they want to make us feel the presence of the code<\/em>. . . . In Warhol . . . intention opens onto a field of logical relations, that is to say: onto a code; or indeed that called a structure<\/em> . . .\u201d17<\/a><\/sup> Masotta calls this process of becoming conscious of the code \u201capperception,\u201d invoking a Kantian term: \u201cThe word refers always, in spite of differences in context, to the idea of a reflexive, highly intellective principle proper to certain mental operations. And it appears also in the psychology of art to designate a certain type of acts of consciousness that are distinguished from perception and imagination, and would realize themselves not so much through a lone act of consciousness but placed in relation to various successive valuated acts.\u201d18<\/a><\/sup> Masotta produced a uniquely creative reading of Pop distinct from that of other contexts outside the United States, where in many cases it was the artists\u2019 political commitment that was up for debate.19<\/a><\/sup> Instead, Masotta saw in Warhol and others a model for art, via apperceptive experience, to train the viewer to look and think critically. This belief informed Masotta\u2019s interdisciplinary practice over the following two years, which included writings, artworks, and perhaps his most important contribution to Argentine art: a collaborative group of like-minded artists, Jacoby among them, that held weekly reading groups and would continue working long after Masotta\u2019s interest in art waned. They would meet at Masotta\u2019s apartment, particularly after he lost his position at the Universidad de Buenos Aires during the military coup.20<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

\"Oscar<\/a>
Oscar Masotta, Para inducir al esp\u00edritu de la imagen<\/em> (To Induce the Spirit of the Image), 1966,<\/strong> Happening, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, 1966 (artwork \u00a9 Oscar Masotta; photograph provided by Susana Lijtmaer)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The dictatorship\u2019s effects on the group\u2019s experiments are marked by the appearance of deception as a strategy. Masotta first devised the Happening Para inducir al esp\u00edritu de la imagen<\/em> (To Induce the Spirit of the Image) after returning from a trip to New York in April 1966. It was delayed until October because of the coup. One component of the Happening was based on a La Monte Young sound environment Masotta had experienced.21<\/a><\/sup> A group of twenty people, all of whom were middle-aged and shabbily attired, was subjected to abrasive noises and lights for an hour. This was slightly altered from the version planned in April. The participants were originally to have been selected from what Masotta called the \u201cthe downtrodden proletariat\u201d\u2014shoeshine boys, beggars, and disabled people. The October version substituted lower-middle-class actors dressed to look poor.22<\/a><\/sup> \u201cAgainst the white wall,\u201d Masotta writes, \u201ctheir spirit shamed and flattened out by the white light, next to each other in a line, the old people were rigid, ready to let themselves be looked at for an hour<\/em>.\u201d23<\/a><\/sup> With this slight discrepancy between actual economic class and dress-up, Masotta turned his participants into a suspect image, a sort of live version of the training in critical thinking that he had previously argued was North American Pop\u2019s objective. The Happening staged an interpellation of one class by another\u2014what he described as \u201csocial sadism.\u201d The possibility remained, however, for viewers (or, more likely, the readers of Masotta\u2019s account of the project) to become aware of their own instinct to \u201ccode\u201d a given social group based on appearance. The Happening was being reframed in Buenos Aires as representation and fiction rather than presence and authenticity.<\/p>\n

Dead Boars<\/strong><\/p>\n

Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em> was a collaboration generated by Masotta\u2019s reading groups, and the only project on which Eduardo Costa, Ra\u00fal Escari, and Jacoby would all collaborate.24<\/a><\/sup> As Masotta would later attest, Jacoby first proposed the idea of a Happening that would consist only of its own documentation and dissemination in the mass media. Earlier that year, Jacoby had already devised artworks premised on absences\u2014missed encounters with the real, as it were. >em>Maqueta de una obra (Maquette for a Work), 1966, for example, is a preparatory sculpture for a final work that is never produced, \u201cfinished\u201d by being forever unfinished. Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em>, in contrast, played with the truth-claim of the photographic record. The artists first asked a group of minor celebrities to \u201cinvent their own participation in the supposed Happening,\u201d and then had the artist Rub\u00e9n Santanton\u00edn take photographs in various locations that were submitted as documentation: ambiguously chaotic images of youthful exuberance or decadence. They took care to note the circulation of each newspaper and magazine that they were deceiving, as if tracking the possible expanded audiences that the project could have. The deception, in this case, was framed as a kind of sociological experiment, one with a political undertone. Several of the publications the artists used, in particular Jacobo Timerman\u2019s newsweekly Primera Plana<\/em>, had predicted and applauded the dictatorship just two months earlier, accepting at face value the military\u2019s claim that it was above politics and only concerned with keeping order.25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\n<\/p>

\"Roberto<\/a>
Roberto Jacoby, Maqueta de una obra<\/em> (Maquette for a Work), 1966, <\/strong> sculpture: polyurethane polyester and other materials, 78\u00be x 39\u215c x 39\u215c in. (2 x 1 x 1 m), installation view, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, 1966 (artwork \u00a9 Roberto Jacoby; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em> corresponds to the category of the \u201cparafictional\u201d that Carrie Lambert-Beatty identified in 2009 as \u201can important category in recent art.\u201d She writes, \u201cPost-simulacral, parafictional strategies are oriented less toward the disappearance of the real than toward the pragmatics of trust. Simply put, with various degrees of success, for various durations, and for various purposes, these fictions are experienced as fact.\u201d26<\/a><\/sup> Costa, Escari, and Jacoby\u2019s experiment suggests that Lambert-Beatty\u2019s category is by no means unique to contemporary art. In Buenos Aires in 1966, the parafiction served at least three objectives: to argue that action-based art, as inherited from Northern centers like New York and Paris, was ultimately an effect of its own reportage; to generate apperception of the mass media as a substrate for works of art; and to draw attention to the ease with which falsehoods could be (and had been) circulated via that substrate. Political protest is here synonymous with art and media critique.<\/p>\n

Masotta\u2019s 1967 lecture \u201cDespu\u00e9s del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializamos\u201d (After Pop, We Dematerialize) served as a summary of media-art experiments between 1965 and 1967. It was written just prior to Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler\u2019s essay \u201cThe Dematerialization of Art,\u201d in which they argued that artists were gradually reducing art to processes and information via \u201cspareness and austerity.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup> Masotta\u2019s desmaterializaci\u00f3n<\/em> shares this logic of reduction, but as a parallel of technological change and media obsolescence. The essay begins by quoting a 1926 text by El Lissitsky\u2014who may have coined the term \u201cdematerialization\u201d\u2014in which he anticipates the replacement of the book by the telephone and radio.28<\/a><\/sup> Masotta discusses how a recent vogue for Happenings in Buenos Aires was in fact an effect of mass-media saturation reporting, which he terms sobreinformaci\u00f3n<\/em>, or \u201cover-information,\u201d rather than reality. This charted the path for a new approach, one that would supersede the Happening or make it outmoded. Effectively hunted down and killed, the \u201cdead boar\u201d of the Happening could be discarded, leaving the mass media as the future conduit of art. \u201cI can affirm,\u201d Masotta writes, \u201cthat there was something within the Happening that allowed us to glimpse the possibility of its own negation, and for that reason the avant-garde is built today on a new type\u2014a new genre\u2014of work.\u201d29<\/a><\/sup> In light of Masotta\u2019s invocation of the avant-garde, it makes sense that Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em> was at other times referred to as Anti-Happening<\/em>. Although Masotta had found fruitful tools in Pop, he glimpsed in the Happening a way to escape from dependence on Northern style.<\/p>\n

\"Eduardo<\/a>
Eduardo Costa, Ra\u00fal Escari, Roberto Jacoby, Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto <\/em>(Happening for a Dead Boar), 1966,<\/strong> press clipping, Roberto Jacoby archive, Buenos Aires (photograph provided by Roberto Jacoby)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not all media art was premised on deception. Jacoby\u2019s open- and closed-circuit projects of 1967 are straightforward reflections on how communication technologies function. In this case, an unrealized proposal for Experiments in Art and Technology, made during a trip to New York with Masotta, sets up a relay between television and teletype machines that report only on each another\u2019s transmission of information.30<\/a><\/sup> On the other hand, in the same period, there are indications of Jacoby\u2019s increasing interest in the social upheaval of the era and its communicational tendencies. At a hippie gathering in Central Park, he wore photographs of Mao Zedong and of Per\u00f3n, who was at that time in exile and believed by the Argentine Left to be a hero who, if he returned, would lead a socialist revolution. Drawn from an actual student chant of the era, Jacoby\u2019s title for this action, Mao y Per\u00f3n, un solo coraz\u00f3n<\/em> (Mao and Per\u00f3n, a single heart), joins the two historical figures through rhyme rather than proof of ideological affinity.31<\/a><\/sup> Pinned to Jacoby\u2019s chest, the two portraits imply mobility, as if they were exchangeable for others. Ernesto \u201cChe\u201d Guevara\u2019s assassination later that year was marked by a commemorative exhibition in Buenos Aires. Jacoby\u2019s contribution, a poster with a the iconic Korda photograph of Che set against a red background and white text that reads Un guerrillero no muere para que se lo cuelgue en la pared<\/em> (A Guerrilla Does Not Die Just to Hang on the Wall), 1968, sets up a paradox that recalls his Maqueta<\/em>, pointing out the literal limits of the work of art in the face of political mobilization. The guerrilla does not die just to hang on the wall, but the inspirational poster that delivers the message does have to hang somewhere; it needs some sort of support or exhibition context.<\/p>\n

A certain ambivalence can still be detected in Jacoby\u2019s participation in Experiencias<\/em> \u201968 at the Di Tella, the turning point of the entire era of Argentine art. When one artist\u2019s work was censored for garnering antidictatorship graffiti, the rest of the exhibiting artists dismantled their works and left them in the street outside the Institute, forever severing ties. Jacoby\u2019s Mensaje en el Di Tella<\/em> captured the heightened tensions of the era. It consisted of three elements: a text by Jacoby that was reproduced in large print in the gallery, a photograph of an African-American protester at an antiwar rally in the United States, and a teletype machine feeding real-time information about May 1968, then unfolding in France. The text was displayed using white detachable letters on a large blackboard, with a handwritten signature at the bottom. \u201cThe future of art,\u201d it reads, \u201cis not connected to the creation of works, but to the definition of new concepts of life, with the artist as propagandist for these concepts.\u201d32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Roberto<\/a>
Roberto Jacoby, Mensaje en el Di Tella<\/em> (Message in the Di Tella), 1968, <\/strong> message board and lettering, photograph, and telex machine, dimensions variable, installation view, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Experiencias \u201968<\/em>, 1968 (artwork \u00a9 Robert Jacoby; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was not just one \u201cmessage\u201d in this work, but at least three: Jacoby\u2019s call to dissolve art into life, the text on the protester\u2019s sign, and the streaming information of France-Presse. Each message relied on a different medium: Jacoby\u2019s prefabricated letters on the blackboard, the journalistic photograph of the protester, and the telex for the news. The artist made his aims clear in a shorter message, placed next to the telex machine: \u201cI want to point out that the content [of the three messages]\u2014especially that which is explicitly ideological or social\u2014possesses a material reality in the consciousness of the receivers.\u201d33<\/a><\/sup> This logic echoes Masotta\u2019s apperception, in which messages are fragmented, emptied, or falsified for the sake of such \u201cconsciousness\u201d of code or media. Rather than voiding his messages outright, however, Jacoby played a balancing act. His passionate argument for moving beyond \u201caesthetic contemplation\u201d was written with interchangeable letters, as if hinting that it was only one of other possible sentiments. As much as the telex brought news of revolutionary change into the gallery setting, it also arrived as information spit out mindlessly by a machine. The photograph of the black protester, like the open-ended signifiers of youth and creativity in the Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em> photographs, has an ambiguous interpretation depending on the viewer\u2019s ideological perspective (one need only think of the polarizing effect of Muhammad Ali, who had refused to be drafted into the US Army one year earlier); simultaneously emblem of the international proletariat and target of those in power. Mensaje en el Di Tella<\/em> is poised between analysis of propaganda and the uncritical use of propaganda.34<\/a><\/sup> Jacoby oscillates between political commitment and voided messages that make conspicuous the media conditioning and delivering them. Mensaje en el Di Tella<\/em> additionally poses the question of art history\u2019s relationship to history proper: \u201cThe avant-garde is the intellectual movement that permanently repudiates art and permanently affirms history.\u201d35<\/a><\/sup> Like Masotta before him, Jacoby draws on a history of the avant-garde that dictates art\u2019s future. This self-conscious turn in art history and the \u201chistory\u201d being photographed and reported over the wires here share common ground not in life or action itself, but in their materialization as messages.<\/p>\n

In August 1968 Jacoby was integral in the group discussions that led to the November opening in Rosario of the exhibition Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em> (Tucum\u00e1n Is Burning). A protest environment installed in a union headquarters, Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em> bombarded those who entered it with overwhelming textual, photographic, and audiovisual evidence of the dictatorship\u2019s economic crimes in the northwestern province of Tucum\u00e1n. The organizers, who included journalists and union activists as well as artists, described the environment as a circuito sobreinformacional<\/em>, using the same term Masotta used a year earlier to describe the media\u2019s obsession with Happenings.36<\/a><\/sup> In this case, sobreinformaci\u00f3n<\/em> was framed positively: the overload of information was to reiterate the message to the point of incontrovertibility. The project used a media-art-style deception, too, publicizing a fake \u201cbiennial of avant-garde art\u201d to provide cover for the environment. Rather than imparting apperception for its own sake, however, this strategy was now ostensibly in the service of a larger ideological end; propaganda appeared to have won out. Yet given Jacoby\u2019s connection to media art, it is interesting to consider alternate readings of, for example, the photography that was employed in Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em> to document rural poverty. Could even Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em>, in its own right, have contained some reflection on its own truth-effects\u2014on the photography of proletarian subjects taken back to a city to inspire an educated public? The majority of the artists associated with this project subsequently took long hiatuses from making art, some permanently. Jacoby\u2019s lasted roughly twenty years, during which time he trained and worked as a sociologist at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n

\"Poster<\/a>
Poster for Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em>(Tucum\u00e1n Is Burning), Rosario version, 1968,<\/strong> fictional biennial posters displayed in the street, Rosario, Argentina, 1968 (photograph provided by Archivo Graciela Carnevale)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Viruses<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jacoby\u2019s 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em> (1968: I Do Your Ass), was first shown in 2008, at the short-lived Galer\u00eda Appetit in Buenos Aires. It is a series of thirty digital prints of objects from the artist\u2019s personal archive, among them photographs, typed notes for works, newspaper and magazine clippings, leftist cartoons, and pages of books. Dating between 1966 and 1970, the archival images are overlaid, via photo-print, with brightly colored texts consisting of quotations and excerpts from Jacoby\u2019s later writings from the 1970s through the present. The combinations of text and document superimpose more recent quotations onto the material surface of the late-1960s archive. Jacoby includes two images of the same book, Masotta\u2019s Conciencia y Estructura<\/em> (Consciousness and Structure), in which Masotta\u2019s lecture \u201cDespu\u00e9s del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializamos\u201d was first published.37<\/a><\/sup> This is a curious inclusion, given that Conciencia y Estructura<\/em> is not a precious or rare archival document\u2014it was a widely published text. One image is of the cover, while the other shows pages 226 and 227, where Masotta identifies media art as a specifically Argentine mode of dematerialization.<\/p>\n

\"Roberto<\/a>
Roberto Jacoby, 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em> (1968: I Do Your Ass), 2008,<\/strong> two of a series of 28 inkjet and silkscreen prints on cotton linters papers, 35\u00bd x 27\u00bd in. (90 x 70 cm) (artwork \u00a9 Roberto Jacoby; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The texts surprinted on these two images are lyrics from the song \u201cIm\u00e1genes Paganas,\u201d by the pop group Virus, for which Jacoby wrote songs in the late 1970s and 1980s. With a homosexual lead singer and bold performance aesthetic, Virus was a rebuke to the military junta that had taken power in 1976. At a moment of profound national despair and at the risk of its members\u2019 own lives, Virus embodied what Jacoby would later call \u201cla estrat\u00e9gia de la alegr\u00eda,\u201d or \u201cthe strategy of joy,\u201d championing disco-era hedonism and sexual liberation as a radical alternatives to authoritarian control. \u201cThe \u2018strategy of joy,\u2019\u201d Jacoby reflected in 2000, \u201cmanifested in musical styles, in forms of presentation, in stage sets, clothes, and makeup: free movement, games with identity, ludic transformation of the environment. Bodies rediscovered the possibilities of entering or creating fictional spaces, visiting alternate, imaginary realities where the crystalline world of solitary and obligatory behavior kept eroding.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup> This was concurrent with the Proceso de Reorganizaci\u00f3n Nacional, the campaign of torture and disappearances\u2014possibly as many as thirty thousand\u2014carried out by the regime. \u201cJoy,\u201d in a time of crisis, sounds like a fiction, but of a utopian variety: a radical disavowal of present conditions.39<\/a><\/sup> 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em> figuratively maps Jacoby\u2019s activity during a period in which he was not a practicing artist onto his 1960s archive\u2014albeit, in this case, onto a book written by someone else. Juli Carson, who exhibited 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em> in the United States, reads this in Lacanian terms, arguing that Jacoby operates on the \u201cprimal scenes\u201d of conceptualism to preserve the possibility of a contemporary \u201ccritical aesthetics.\u201d40<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Although from the same song, the lyrics printed over the two images of Conciencia y Estructura<\/em> are distinct. Over the cover of Masotta\u2019s book, one reads \u201cIm\u00e1genes paganas se desnudan en sue\u00f1os\u201d (Pagan images disrobe in dreams), while the text superimposed on pages 226 and 227 laments, \u201cMis propios dioses ya no est\u00e1n\u201d (My own gods are no longer). The former conveys erotic desire, the latter a sense of loss that might be associated with Masotta, who died in 1979 (the original song adds, \u201cespejismos,\u201d or mirages). But if Masotta was indeed a \u201cgod,\u201d he has been profaned. Jacoby alters, even violates, this trace of his colleague\u2019s work, as he does with so many images from his own archive. The title of the series adapts an Argentine expression of contempt for anything that rhymes with \u201cabrocho”(abrochar<\/em> means \u201cto sew up\u201d or \u201cto fasten\u201d). The archive \u201c1968\u201d is figured as a body with a rectum that can be fastened, sealed off. In this interpretation, the artist is sewing up the productive capacity of the archive, perhaps in an effort to halt the historical conversation it generates. The rhyming words of the title, \u201cSesenta y ocho, el culo te abrocho<\/em>\u201d momentarily empty the entity \u201c1968\u201d of its meaning, instantiating the loss of the date\u2019s spectral power and the inauguration of new, expressly contemporary functions for the archive.41<\/a><\/sup> Abrochar<\/em> can also mean to \u201cto struggle\u201d or \u201cto wrestle\u201d with something, and in its popular slang use\u2014one always implied in the children\u2019s rhyme from which the title derives\u2014to \u201ctake\u201d or to \u201cfuck\u201d someone else.42<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Roberto<\/a>
Roberto Jacoby, 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em> (1968: I Do Your Ass), 2008,<\/strong> two of a series of 28 inkjet and silkscreen prints on cotton linters papers, 35\u00bd x 27\u00bd in. (90 x 70 cm) (artwork \u00a9 Roberto Jacoby; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This bodily logic was anticipated in La castidad<\/em>, a 2007 collaboration in which Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny, a young art student, entered into a widely publicized \u201cplatonic relationship,\u201d complete with the production of platonic dialogues. Given that some of the texts were published in a porn magazine, the project attracted skepticism from all quarters\u2014the general assumption was that the commitment not to have sex was a fiction. One section of the dialogues reads: <\/p>\n

\n

Syd: Tell me about bodies, about all the bodies that attract and confuse you, asphyxiate and invade you. Of the bodies that we are and through which we endure indecent dreams . . . of the bodies in which we wake up, howling with terror.<\/p>\n

Roberto: This will take us a ways, are you up for it?<\/p>\n

Syd: Walk, I long for your words.<\/p>\n

Roberto: We have already begun. Perhaps you didn\u2019t hear me?<\/p>\n

Syd: Sure, but perhaps we\u2019re not speaking? I am giving you my full attention.<\/p>\n

Roberto: So my voice has penetrated you. Something from my body\u2014the fine grain of my voice flew up to the window of your ears and entered into you without opening your gates to me.43<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A similar erotics is in play in 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em>. A \u201cvoice\u201d\u2014this time a written text\u2014\u201cinvades\u201d and infects each archival artifact. If the historical object originally had influences or collaborators, these authorial subjects are confused, intertwined.<\/p>\n

The series also shares affinities with 77 Testicular Imprints<\/em>, an artist\u2019s book and series of works on paper by Nicol\u00e1s Guagnini that Jacoby saw in New York in 2007. Dipping his testicles in bright paint and applying them to collectors\u2019 items such as first editions of philosophy books, vintage magazines, rare posters, and ephemera, Guagnini contaminated the archival purity of his objects through indexical traces of his own body. In his introduction to the \u201c1000 Words\u201d text of 2011, Guagnini remembers that when he was a child in Buenos Aires, Jacoby played a game with him in which they cut the captions out of comic strips to switch the identities of the heroes and the villains to \u201cmake the bad guys win.\u201d44<\/a><\/sup> A child\u2019s version of Jacoby\u2019s critique of political rhetoric in the late 1960s, this trick meant something altogether different in 1976. Guagnini\u2019s father had been \u201cdisappeared\u201d by the dictatorship, and Jacoby was acting as a substitute, providing guidance, while poetically accounting for a world in which the bad guys were indeed winning.<\/p>\n

\"Nicol\u00e1s<\/a>
Nicol\u00e1s Guagnini, 77 Testicular Imprints<\/em>, 2007, <\/strong> detail of altered original Piero Manzoni and Claes Oldenburg posters, dimensions of series variable (artwork \u00a9 Nicol\u00e1s Guagnini; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em>, the chief object of archival anxiety has become the artist\u2019s own past self as represented by archival relics, while the material record of the artist\u2019s erogenous zone has been exchanged for the quotation: language that, even if originally produced by one author, can be excerpted and recontextualized (many of the texts are Jacoby\u2019s quotations of other authors). In the two images based on Conciencia y Estructura<\/em>, it is as though Jacoby blurs the boundaries between his past and present selves with that of Masotta, himself no stranger to the vagaries of authorship. In his 1965 essay \u201cRoberto Arlt, yo mismo,\u201d Masotta wrote about his own recent discovery of Lacanian psychoanalysis instead of about Arlt, the fiction writer who was his ostensible subject.45<\/a><\/sup> A closer inspection of Jacoby\u2019s photo-printed image of pages 226 and 227 reveals that the Masotta text is not identical to the original edition of 1969. Jacoby has turned endnote 7, which credits him alone with the invention of media art, into a footnote, so that it appears on the same page. The material veracity of the archive has been tampered with in the service of a certain truth, one that aims to sew up forever any debates about credit. In the process, Jacoby has leveraged a different truth: the collaborative nature of almost all the initial salvos of Argentine conceptualism.<\/p>\n

Zombies<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the aforementioned \u201c1000 Words,\u201d Jacoby addresses his censored project for the 2010 Bienal de S\u00e3o Paulo, El alma nunca piensa sin imagen<\/em> (The Soul Never Thinks without an Image). A collaborative endeavor, the project was cut short because of its apparent support for Dilma Rousseff\u2019s presidential candidacy, which was in direct violation of the event\u2019s regulations (it is literally a crime in Brazil to use government-appointed funds in favor of any specific political party). The Brigada Argentina por Dilma, the group of intellectuals who accompanied Jacoby to S\u00e3o Paulo and who could not vote in the election, held a series of \u201cludic pedagogical workshops\u201d within the exhibition space until the project was shut down. The Bienal\u2019s theme was, ironically enough, that art and politics could not be separated, a familiar refrain among the many recent biennials that have added to the reputation of Latin American conceptualism as authentic, participatory, and political, \u201cthriving on adversity,\u201d in H\u00e9lio Oiticica\u2019s famous words.46<\/a><\/sup> Regardless, the curators released a statement insisting that they had had no idea what Jacoby had planned to do. \u201cThe artist,\u201d they wrote, \u201casserted that he intended to use a fictitious<\/em> and hypothetical<\/em> campaign as a platform for reflection upon electoral processes in general. . . . On the opening night of the 29th S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial (September 21), contrary to the assurances made to the curators, Mr. Roberto Jacoby and the rest of his \u2018Argentinean Brigade for Dilma\u2019 not only distributed campaign pamphlets in favor of Dilma Rousseff, but ran video footage featuring declarations of support for the candidate.\u201d47<\/a><\/sup> The video in question includes a series of poorly produced \u201ctestimonials\u201d from various artists and intellectuals in Buenos Aires, some of whom pledge their support for Rousseff half-heartedly, as if they are not quite sure to whom they are referring. The ambiguously optimistic images and rhetoric in the video recall Happening para un jabal\u00ed difunto<\/em>. Jacoby appears at one point with a beneficent smile, addressing the viewer in \u201cPortu\u00f1ol,\u201d a combination of Spanish and Portuguese\u2014something of a fictional language. He claims to be the representative of a \u201cnew Argentine cult, the movement of the Devil,\u201d and speaks of Rousseff with idealistic praise.<\/p>\n

\u201cWas this a real electoral campaign,\u201d says Jacoby in Artforum<\/em>, \u201cor an artistic fiction? Isn\u2019t the art institution the space that confers the status of \u2018the ideal\u2019 on any image or process that develops within it?\u201d48<\/a><\/sup> He claims that El alma nunca piensa sin imagen<\/em> was \u201cnot very different\u201d from Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em>, likening the icon of Latin American political conceptualism to a cleverly engineered scandal\u2014yet perhaps he was not merely being irreverent. This reflection could be understood as locating Masotta\u2019s apperception in Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em>\u2019s surfeit of propaganda, so that even the latter becomes a reflection on activist art and its media, despite its sincere activism. El alma nunca piensa sin imagen, in turn, critiques how a new canon of political art in Latin America is being used to build an art market and an internationally powerful set of institutions in the region today.49<\/a><\/sup> It also served as an effective way to distinguish Jacoby from surviving rosarino<\/em> colleagues from Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em>, who have continued to historicize and promote the project as a traveling archive that has been installed in various biennials and gallery exhibitions. This is not to say that Jacoby is no longer interested in politics, however. One of his most recent works, 14Bis Panfleto de la Extrema Democracia<\/em> (Pamplet of Extreme Democracy), 2011, involved the obsessive reproduction of a little-considered passage in the Argentine constitution that protects dignified working conditions, access to adequate housing, and other social rights\u2014in this case, a utopian fiction, rendered into law, that remains in potential as reality.<\/p>\n

At a roundtable on Argentine contemporary art at the Americas Society in New York in 2007, Jacoby declared the 1960s version of himself \u201cdead.\u201d He wanted to stop having to answer for his earlier self\u2019s actions, he explained, asserting that he is now a contemporary artist like any other, focused exclusively on the concerns of the present.50<\/a><\/sup> Certainly, in the last twenty years, in addition to his own artistic production, Jacoby has been one of the most influential figures in Buenos Aires art, using his own funds to support contemporary art spaces that have shaped successive generations of new artists. In the process, these artists have formed substantial international networks, becoming \u201camigos de Jacoby,\u201d to quote the phrase that circulated in one such initiative, Tecnolog\u00edas de Amistad (Technologies of Friendship), 2006, and through alternative spaces such as Belleza y Felicidad, run by Fernanda Laguna in Buenos Aires from 1999 to 2007.51<\/a><\/sup> His most recent institutional project is the Centro de Investigaciones Art\u00edsticas, or C.I.A., in Buenos Aires, 2009\u2013present, for which all collaborators and participants are given the title of agente, or agent<\/em>.52<\/a><\/sup> This contemporary activity, however, is unimaginable without Jacoby\u2019s identity as a now-canonical 1960s artist\u2014an association that he reconfigured and revitalized in 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em>. If the 1960s Jacoby is dead, this corpse still engages in zombie aesthetics, feasting on living and defunct alike.<\/p>\n

\n

Daniel R. Quiles<\/strong> is an assistant professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses on the theory and history of postwar art of the Americas. He is currently writing a book manuscript titled \u201cGhost Messages: Oscar Masotta and Argentine Conceptualism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2014 issue of Art Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Nicol\u00e1s Guagnini, \u201c1000 Words: Roberto Jacoby Talks about El alma nunca piensa sin imagen<\/em> (The Soul Never Thinks without an Image), 2010,\u201d Artforum International<\/em> 49, no. 7 (March 2011): 248\u201350. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Eduardo Costa and Roberto Jacoby, \u201cRealizaci\u00f3n de la primera obra,\u201d in Happenings<\/em>, ed. Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge \u00c1lvarez, 1967), 113\u201318. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Eduardo Costa, Ra\u00fal Escari, and Roberto Jacoby, \u201cUn arte de los medios de comunicaci\u00f3n (manifiesto),\u201d in Happenings<\/em>, 119\u201322. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. The exhibition took place at the Reina Sof\u00eda between February 25 and May 30, 2011. See Roberto Jacoby, El deseo nace del derrumbe: Roberto Jacoby; Acciones, conceptos, escritos<\/em>, exh. cat., ed. Ana Longoni (Barcelona: Ediciones de La Central\/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda, 2011). A blog posting with color photographs of the 2010 event identifies the satyr as \u201cS\u00e1tiro Gab\u00ednides,\u201d here<\/a>, as of November 24, 2014. The artist identified him as Horacio Gabin, a clown and performer, in an e-mail of December 1, 2014. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. The present wave of interest in Latin American modern and contemporary art arguably began with H\u00e9ctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ram\u00edrez\u2019s 2000 exhibition Heterotop\u00edas: Medio siglo sin-lugar 1918\u20131968<\/em> (Heterotopias: A Half-Century without Place) at Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda in Madrid (restaged as Inverted Utopias<\/em> when it traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 2004), which represented a major departure from a previous, essentialist canon that privileged the \u201cfantastic.\u201d Olea and Ram\u00edrez instead focused on expressionism, abstraction, and participation, calling particular attention to the media and political emphases of the region\u2019s conceptualism. See Heterotopias: medio siglo sin-lugar, 1918\u20131968<\/em>, exh. cat., ed. Ram\u00edrez and Olea (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof\u00eda, 2000). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. See Andrea Giunta, Vanguardia, internacionalismo y pol\u00edtica: Arte argentino en los a\u00f1os sesenta<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Paid\u00f3s, 2001), later published as Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties<\/em>, trans. Peter Kahn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. Among other sources, see Liliana de Riz, Historia argentina: La pol\u00edtica en suspenso 1966 \/ 1976<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Paid\u00f3s, 2000), 42\u201358; and David Rock, Argentina 1516\u20131987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfons\u00edn<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 333\u201358. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. For an exhaustive history of political content in 1960s Argentine art, see Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a \u201cTucum\u00e1n Arde\u201d: Vanguardia art\u00edstica y pol\u00edtica en el \u201968 argentino<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Ediciones El Cielo por Asalto, 2000). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. Kaira Caba\u00f1as, \u201cYves Klein\u2019s Performative Realism,\u201d Grey Room<\/em> 31 (Spring 2008): 6\u201331. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Such reports about Greco\u2019s methods were exhaustively chronicled for his retrospective in Spain. A specific claim that Greco urinated on his canvases was made by Luis Felipe No\u00e9 for a tribute exhibition in 1970. See No\u00e9, \u201cAlberto Greco: A cinco a\u00f1os de su muerte,\u201d in Alberto Greco<\/em>, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Galer\u00eda Carmen Waugh, 1970); and Alberto Greco<\/em>, exh. cat., ed. Francisco Rivas (Valencia: Fundaci\u00f3n Cultural Mapfre Vida, 1991). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. The title Vivo-Dito<\/em> combines the Spanish word for \u201cliving\u201d and the Italian word for \u201cfinger.\u201d Greco\u2019s strategy parallels that of many other artists at this moment, including Klein (selling air), Piero Manzoni (signing live models\u2019 bodies), and, in Czechoslovakia, Stano Filko and Alex Mlyn\u00e1r\u010dik, who declared all of Bratislava an artwork in their Happsoc I<\/em>, 1965. Taking up Peter B\u00fcrger\u2019s pejorative moniker \u201cneo-avant-garde,\u201d Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has argued that such gestures accompanied knowing repetitions of prewar avant-garde strategies. Buchloh did not address the possibility that such repetitions, when exaggerated, create a space for critique by artists from peripheral centers. Buchloh, \u201cThe Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,\u201d October<\/em> 37 (Summer 1986): 41\u201352. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. See Rodrigo Alonso and Paulo Herkenhoff, eds., Arte de contradicciones: Pop, realismos y pol\u00edtica Brasil-Argentina 1960<\/em>, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Fundaci\u00f3n Proa, 2011), 164\u201375; and Edgardo Gim\u00e9nez, ed., Jorge Romero Brest: La cultura como provocaci\u00f3n<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Edicio\u0301n Edgardo Gime\u0301nez, 2006), 300\u20131. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. For an overview of ,em>Contorno, see Oscar Ter\u00e1n, Nuestras a\u00f1os sesentas: La formaci\u00f3n de la nueva izquierda intelectual en la Argentina 1956\u20131966<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Puntosur, 1991). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  14. Oscar Masotta, \u201cRoberto Arlt, yo mismo,\u201d in Conciencia y Estructura<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge \u00c1lvarez, 1968), 177\u201392. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  15. For example, see the illustration of Andy Warhol\u2019s Green Coca-Cola Bottles<\/em>, 1962\u20131963, Oscar Masotta, El \u201cpop-art\u201d<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Columba, 1967), 87. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  16. My forthcoming book manuscript, \u201cGhost Messages: Oscar Masotta and Argentine Conceptualism,\u201d will trace this strategy of deliberate miscommunication throughout the work of Masotta, his colleagues, and subsequent Argentine conceptualists from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  17. Masotta, El \u201cpop-art,\u201d<\/em> 65, emphasis in the orig. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  18. Ibid., 73\u201374. \u201cApperception\u201d as a philosophical and pedagogical concept goes back at least as far as Immanuel Kant, who differentiated between \u201cempirical\u201d (corresponding to changing states in the present) and \u201ctranscendental\u201d (corresponding to experience as an a priori category) modes of apperception. Read through Masotta\u2019s interest in Lacan, Kant\u2019s \u201cself-consciousness\u201d would need to pass through the linguistic structures that constitute the decentered self. Hence the use of the term \u201capperception\u201d: self-knowledge here is manifested through recognition of the codes that structure the surrounding, subject-constituting linguistic field. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  19. Several recent exhibitions, including the upcoming International Pop<\/em> at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (April\u2013September 2015), have begun the work of comparing receptions of Pop in different global contexts. See also Alonso and Herkenhoff, Arte de contradicciones<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  20. See Juan Andrade, Oscar Masotta: Una leyenda en el cruce de los saberes (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2009), 115\u201332. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  21. Happenings<\/em>, 162\u201367. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  22. Ibid., 199. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  23. Ibid., 200, emphasis in orig. Spanish text. This can be likened to Masotta\u2019s take in El \u201cpop-art\u201d<\/em> on George Segal, whose cast-based sculptures he describes as \u201cmasks in reverse\u201d that empty out the individuality of sitters into conventional gestures. In the conclusion of the book Masotta extends the argument to Pop as a whole, arguing that it is a response to the deindividualizing effects of North American capitalism. Masotta, El \u201cpop-art,\u201d<\/em> 102\u201312. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  24. Costa and Jacoby worked together on other projects, including Primera audici\u00f3n de obras creadas con lenguaje oral<\/em> (First Recital of Oral Language Works), 1966, with Juan Risuleo, which featured tape recordings of everyday spoken language presented as \u201cliterary works.\u201d See Jacoby, El deseo nace del derrumbe<\/em>, 57\u201359. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  25. This was invariably the position of the right-wing secret societies in the military that periodically organized coups in Argentina throughout the postwar period. See David Rock, Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement, Its History, and Its Impact<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  26. Carrie Lambert-Beatty, \u201cMake-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,\u201d October<\/em> 129 (Summer 2009): 54. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  27. Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, \u201cThe Dematerialization of Art\u201d (1968), rep. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology<\/em>, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 46\u201350. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  28. El Lissitzky, \u201cThe Future of the Book\u201d (1926), rep. New Left Review<\/em> 1, no. 41 (January\u2013February 1967): 39\u201344. Masotta quoted Lissitzky in \u201cDespu\u00e9s del Pop: Nosotros desmaterializamos\u201d (1967), in Conciencia y Estructura<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge \u00c1lvarez, 1968), 218\u201344; rep. as Oscar Masotta, \u201cAfter Pop, We Dematerialize,\u201d trans. Eileen Brockbank, in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde<\/em>, ed. In\u00e9s Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 208\u201316. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  29. Masotta, \u201cAfter Pop, We Dematerialize,\u201d 213. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  30. Jacoby, ,em>El deseo nace del derrumbe, 78\u201379. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  31. Per\u00f3n\u2019s return to Argentina in 1973 was marked by conflict and increasing repression of the far-left radicals who had supported him in absentia. When he died in 1974, his wife Isabelita organized the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, a military death squad, to target the Montoneros and other revolutionary guerrillas. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  32. Roberto Jacoby, \u201cMessage in the Di Tella\u201d (1968), trans. Marguerite Feitlowitz, Listen, Here, Now!<\/em>, 290. See also Jacoby, Media Art \/ Arte de los medios 1966\u201368<\/em>, CD-ROM published by Jacoby, section on Mensaje en el Di Tella<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  33. Jacoby, El deseo nace del derrumbe<\/em>, 117. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  34. As Longoni and Mestman report, this faith in aesthetics would be a source of conflict throughout the Tucum\u00e1n Arde<\/em> collaboration of 1968 that I discuss in the next paragraph, and a reason for the departure from the project of artists such as Margarita Paksa and Ricardo Carreira. The participating Buenos Aires artists were generally more disposed to retain elements of aesthetic reflection in the project, while artists from Rosario favored a more direct, propagandistic approach. See Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a \u201cTucum\u00e1n Arde,\u201d<\/em> 150\u201369. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  35. Jacoby, \u201cMessage in the Di Tella,\u201d 288. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  36. See Mar\u00eda Teresa Gramuglio and Nicol\u00e1s Rosa, \u201cDeclaraci\u00f3n de la muestra de Rosario,\u201d in Del Di Tella a \u201cTucum\u00e1n Arde,\u201d<\/em> 233\u201335. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  37. Oscar Masotta, Conciencia y Estructura<\/em> (Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Alvarez, 1968). Jacoby has championed this text as predating Lucy Lippard\u2019s \u201cThe Dematerialization of Art\u201d by a year. See Roberto Jacoby, \u201cDespu\u00e9s del todo, nosotros desmaterializamos,\u201d Ramona<\/em> 8\u20139 (December 2000\u2013March 2001): 34\u201335. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  38. Jacoby, \u201cLa alegr\u00eda como estrategia\u201d (2000), rep. El deseo nace del derrumbe<\/em>, 411. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  39. Jacoby incorporated a similar strategy more than a decade later, when the AIDS crisis struck Buenos Aires. A T-shirt campaign that drew on Jacoby\u2019s work in advertising, Yo tengo SIDA<\/em> (I Have AIDS), 1994, is another play on a doubtful claim. In this case, Jacoby devised a simple gesture that produced commonality between infected and healthy during the worst years of the epidemic. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  40. Juli Carson, \u201cRoberto Jacoby\u2019s 1968: El culo te abrocho<\/em>,\u201d exh. brochure (Los Angeles: University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 2009), n.p., at http:\/\/uag.arts.uci.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/RobertoJacoby_0.pdf, as of November 24, 2014. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  41. It is important to point out that in its colloquial form, the phrase is expressly childish and nonsensical\u2014an excuse to utter the word culo, with equivalents for other numbers such as \u201cnueve, el culo te llueve<\/em>\u201d (nine, your ass rains) and \u201cdiez, el culo al rev\u00e9s<\/em>\u201d (ten, upside-down ass). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  42. As Carson writes, \u201cdesire itself is at once the archive\u2019s secret that dare not speak its name and its driving force.\u201d Carson, \u201cRoberto Jacoby\u2019s 1968<\/em>.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  43. Roberto Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny, \u201cLa Castidad\u201d (2007), rep. El deseo nace del derrumbe<\/em>, 445\u201349. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  44. Guagnini, 248. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  45. Masotta, \u201cRoberto Arlt, yo mismo\u201d (1965), 177\u201392. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  46. See, among many other examples, Frederico Morais, ed., I Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul<\/em>, exh. cat. (Porto Alegre, Brazil: Fundac\u0327a\u0303o Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, 1997); Roger M. Buergel, ed., Documenta 12<\/em>, exh. cat. (Cologne: Taschen, 2007); and Eungie Joo, ed., The Ungovernables: 2012 New Museum Triennial<\/em>, exh. cat. (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  47. See Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, \u201cS\u00e3o Paulo Is Burning: A Response,\u201d Chtodelat News, at http:\/\/chtodelat.wordpress.com\/2010\/10\/13\/sao-paulo-is-burning-a-response\/, as of June 14, 2014. The curators are responding to an initial protest at the censorship by Jacoby. See also Brigada Argentina por Dilma, \u201cArde San Pablo: El fantasma de la pol\u00edtica en la Bienal,\u201d September 23, 2010, in Spanish and English at www.ramona.org.ar\/node\/34050, as of November 12, 2014. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  48. Jacoby quoted in Guagnini, 250. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  49. These range from market-driven initiatives such as the PINTA Art Fair, which took place in New York for several years and presently has versions in both Miami and London (see www.pintalondon.com\/ and http:\/\/pintamiami.com\/, as of November 11, 2014), to the radical archive research of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (which, not insignificantly, helped to organize and sponsor Jacoby\u2019s retrospective at the Reina Sof\u00eda; see Southern Conceptualisms Network, \u201cMicropolitics of the Archive,\u201d Asia Art Archive Field Notes<\/em> 2 (December 2012), at www.aaa.org.hk\/FieldNotes\/Details\/1208, as of November 25, 2014, and Ana Longoni et al., \u201cForum: Red Conceptualismos del Sur\/Southern Conceptualisms Network,\u201d Art Journal<\/em> 73, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 14\u2013115. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  50. The panel included the curator Victoria Noorthoorn and the artists Marta Minuj\u00edn, Judy Wertheim, and Marina de Caro, and I was the moderator. It was organized in conjunction with the exhibition Beginning with a Bang! From Confrontation to Intimacy: An Exhibition of Argentine Contemporary Artists, 1967\u20132000<\/em>, which took place at the Americas Society, New York, in 2007. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  51. See Syd Krochmalny, \u201cTecnolog\u00edas de la amistad: Las formas sociales de producci\u00f3n, gesti\u00f3n y circulaci\u00f3n art\u00edstica en base a la Amistad,\u201d ramona<\/em>, at www.teoriasdelaamistad.com.ar\/pagina5\/Unidad10\/Tecnologiasdelaamistad.pdf, as of November 12, 2014. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  52. See http:\/\/ciacentro.org.ar\/, as of November 12, 2014. For full disclosure: I gave a series of four seminars at Centro de Investigaciones Art\u00edsticas in the summer of 2013, on the theme of fiction in postwar and contemporary art. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Daniel R. Quiles
    \nThe subtlest of deceptions lies in wait in a \u201c1000 Words\u201d feature on Roberto Jacoby in the March 2011 issue of Artforum<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":5768,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}