In 1969, Jorge Romero Brest, the director of the Visual Arts Center for the Di Tella Institute, had the idea to turn the Center’s exhibition space into a television studio. He wanted to change the structure of the institute and explore the possibilities of this new communication medium in an experimental and modern context. Many local artists had already been doing this. Television was still young, shiny, and offered them a cool new media with which to work. This new medium could be turned into sculptures, installations, used as a tool for theoretical investigations or to invent new rules of play for the art world. And, after all, television was very, very popular.
Unfortunately, Brest was never able to accomplish all that he wanted to do. Still, the artists of Di Tella made an impact. The exhibition, Televisión, El Di Tella y un episodio en la historia de la TV (Television, The Di Tella and one episode in TV’s history) currently at the Fundación Telefónica, attempts to document that impact.
The exhibition, at first look, appears more like a reading room filled with TV sets and projections on the walls. However, this archive of activities developed at the Di Tella hides within it one of the most important episodes in the history of Argentine avant-garde arts.
Projects represented include those from Marta Minujín, David Lamelas, Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari, Luis Felipe Noé, “Grupo Frontera”, Jorge de la Vega and the “Grupo Pop”. Considering the ephemeral or site-specific nature of many of the presented works, Curators Rafael Cippolini and Inés Katzenstein chose to gather photography, artists’ texts and TV recordings and mix them with works of that period. The curators also commissioned three special projects by contemporary artists.
Anyone entering the main exhibition room immediately sees a hanging crucifix; however, the face of Christ has been replaced by the face of our modern “Everyday Lord” (Nuestro Señor de cada día, 1964), the television set. It’s a work by Luis Felipe Noé, an artist who claimed that “the best TV is the malfunctioning one.”
Next to that, a minimalistic but still fetishistic work by David Lamelas, Situación de tiempo (Situation of time), links institutions of culture and industry. Invited to contribute to Experiencias Visuales 1967 at the Di Tella, Lamelas borrowed seventeen television sets — the latest models produced by Di Tella Electronics — and placed them on three walls of a large room. Tuned to a non-existent channel, they emitted a bright light that took complete possession of the space. By depriving the TV sets of their function as purveyors of pictures and information, Lamelas nullified them, reducing them to generators of undifferentiated white noise.
That noise gains color in Miguel Mitlag’s installation, Es con gran placer que anunciamos una repetición (It is with great pleasure that we are announcing a repetition), one of the works commissioned for this exhibition. Inspired by Lamelas, it consists of three identical small, TV-studio sets, like the ones used in news broadcasts, displayed next to each other. Identical in all details, only the colors differ. They act as artificial replicas of a theatre of misinformation.
Roberto Jacoby made the processing of information a key part of his work. Projects like his Closed information circuits were more concerned with the moment of transmission of the work of art than in its actual production. He organized transmissions-conferences on the art of mass media such as Parameters, in which “what is said” was not as fundamentally important as the study of media as such. The self-promotion strategies of “Grupo Pop” questioned this system, as well. This group of artists took advantage of the interest the new media had showed them in order to construct a new, self-reflexive portrait of the “young artist.” Thus, they modified and played with the borders between art and its social prominence.
Marta Minujín became the most iconic of the artists working at the Di Tella. Her role in this history appears in this exhibition via written and filmed historical documents. For instance, she was the first artist ever to make a Happening happen live on TV. In 1963, she was invited to a very popular TV show and brought with her a pony carrying buckets of paint, several chickens as well as muscular athletes. This unexpected appearance ended in a big scandal and caused an abrupt end of the broadcast.
Minujín collaborated with Rubén Santaonín on La Menesunda — porteño slang for confusion — which continues to be her most remembered work. Attempting to create a participatory form of art, La Menesunda consisted of a variety of weird, walk-through environments. Those who chose to participate would meet a couple in bed, stay in a room flooded with the smell of a dentist’s office, wander around a gigantic head of a woman filled with cosmetics, stay trapped in a space from which they could only exit by dialing a telephone number, or be guided through a room where several fans created whirlwinds of confetti.
Designed to affect the senses and with the aim of “waking the audience up and making it live through the direct action of consternation and surprise,” the journey ended with the participants being shown via closed-circuit TV their own images taken as they had walked through the project. La Menesunda functioned as a “revolutionary pamphlet” for an art that increasingly approximated life. Minujín piece, on the other hand, mocked television’s reliance on audience passivity.
In a country where art used to be synonymous with elitism and boring paintings, this unique and unprecedented show succeeded so well that it attracted a crowd of some thirty-thousand people who would even wait in line eight hours just to experience it. Curator Jorge Romero Brest called it an event of “nonsensical caprice.” The presentation of this piece at the Fundación Telefónica provides a scale model of that installation shown on a B&W monitor, allowing an updated view of this seminal work by Minujín.
These energetic, enthusiastic, experimental works came to a bitter end before the 70s began. Not only did the gallery not become a TV studio, but the whole Di Tella Institute closed for political and economic reasons. Espacio Fundación Telefónica’s thoroughly documented exhibition effectively recaptures the mandates and desires of that decade and its ambitious multimedia projects.
Text and photographs by Ariel Authier
Televisión
El Di Tella y un episodio en la vida de la TV
Espacio Fundación Telefónica
Arenales 1540, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Until December 18th, 2010
Monday through Saturday, 2 PM – 8:30 PM
Free entrance
