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At the same time, the work in “Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Argentinean Art” represents much more than can be contained in the simple dictionary definition of a word. The artist’s cantos paralelos or parallel songs can be very complex at times, and each peels away the fine layers of Argentinean culture in a way that reflects the individual artist’s intelligent wit. Moreover, there are universal meanings that may be gleaned from the caustic, playful, and skilled artwork on display, meanings that transcend the specifics of Argentinean life. After all, this is art born of repression and steeped in themes such as sexuality, religion, and violence, three subjects never too far from home in our own country.
The exhibit, curated by Mari Carmen Ramirez, the Blanton’s curator of Latin American Art, is a major enterprise. It is not only the centerpiece of a semester-long festival of Argentinean culture on the UT campus, but it is an exhibition which will travel nationally and internationally, to Phoenix, Ariz., Bogota, Colombia, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. And it features work by nine Argentinean artists, most of whom have never shown their work in this country.
When you walk in, to the right is the work of Antonio Berni, probably Argentina’s most famous and certainly its most influential artist. According to curator Ramirez, Berni was, before his death in 1981, not only the central figure among these nine artists but a leading personality in all of Argentina. “Berni highlights the dialogue between the artists,” says Ramirez, “and although there was no artistic movement in Argentina, Berni and this dialogue became central to Argentinean art.” With that in mind, one can see Berni’s work winding sarcastically through the gallery like an acrimonious vine from which the other artists flower. The vine consists of fictitious monsters and characters at the fringe of society, with commentary on sex and violence and a technique that focuses on a symbolic recycling of materials. In fact, Ramirez’s curatorial work is so effective — thematically linking one artist to the next — that as you stroll through the exhibit, it’s hard not to recognize that every artist after Berni has either built on or taken from what he did.
Berni’s most famous works are those in the “Ramona” series, for which he won the Venice Biennial in 1962. A collection of xylo collage reliefs that center around Ramona, an invented character who lives in a well-known shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the series parodies the moral foundations of Argentina with depictions of military and royal personalities who come to the shantytown looking for sex. The artist employs an unusual wood block-like technique (xylon is Greek for wood), enhanced with doilies and scrap metal used to emboss materials to the paper. The works are beautifully detailed and meticulously wrought with objects found at the actual shantytown. (Berni’s technique of recycling materials is an important device employed by all the artists in the exhibit, from Jorge de la Vega in his collage work to Luis Fernando Benedit in his “Ranchero” sculptures to Rub�n Santanton�n in his “Things” series.) Still, they uncover the harsh and often overlooked reality of Argentina’s lower class.
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Ramona Vive su Vida |
Violence and repression are further evident in the sculpture of Juan Carlos Dist�fano, perhaps the most exciting artist in the show. With a laborious but fluid technique that involves shrouding his fiberglass and reinforced polyester sculptures in thick coats of epoxy resin, his figures look surprisingly serene as they strain to break free from their frozen prisons. Spiderweb II (1974-75) shows a male figure straining to emerge from his epoxy net with one clenched fist tugging at his heart and the other wrenched and grappling behind his back, his head and neck lurching upward. Like many of the artists in this exhibition, Dist�fano was himself a marginal character, working for years in exile in Brazil because of his anti-government subject matter.
Perhaps the most curious work in the downstairs gallery is that of Luis Fernando Benedit, the only artist here who parodies the gaucho, or Argentinean cowboy, and the country life on the pampas. Much like his contemporary Florencio Molina Campos, whose work is presently on display at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Benedit uses cartoons and caricatures to dispel the gaucho myth. However, Benedit, who is an architect and an ethnographer by trade, involves these drawings in complex installations that, like Berni, incorporate a variety of materials to underscore the exploits of industrial Argentina on the indigenous people. His “Rancho” series upstairs consists of three plexiglass huts stuffed with sugar, wool, and horsehair.
Moving upstairs, one finds the highly conceptualized work of V�ctor Grippo, Le�n Ferrari, and Rub�n Santanton�n. With less natural light and more dark corners, it seems as though the work there has been conspicuously shoved aside and reserved for only the most adventurous museumgoers. But with the exception of Santanton�n, much of the work parodies religious oppression, violence, and exploitation that are similar in intent to the downstairs works.
For example, Grippo, like Benedit, is interested in the effect of Argentina’s immigrant society on the indigenous culture, and his use of meaningful materials — in this case food, flowers, and metals — can be linked to Berni. In the installation sculpture Life — Death — Resurrection (1980), he stuffed lead shapes with coffee beans and added water until the fermenting beans burst the shapes. The lead represents war, death, and the repression of life, while the beans suggest the persistence of life out of death. Ferrari, the oldest artist in the show after Berni, was a pioneer of conceptual and controversial art in the Sixties. In fact, his sculpture Western and Christian Civilization (1965) that hangs from the rafters above the first floor gallery was considered such a controversial work for its attack on the church and the military that it was banned from the country. It has only recently resurfaced.
Santanton�n, on the other hand, seems to have been included in the show to parody the other artists who are parodying Argentina with their art. His “Things” series, a collection of unfamiliar and otherworldly objects, are more like anti-art meant only to jolt and provoke a reaction from the viewer. In a symbolic commitment to these beliefs, Santanton�n burned all but four of his sculptures before his death in 1969. Those four pieces, along with one replica, now hang in this exhibition.
After returning to democracy in 1983, Argentina has relaxed many of the oppressive traditions brought about by the military dictatorship, though some would say not nearly enough. And while the art in “Cantos Paralelos” is by no means meant to be a comprehensive overview of art in Argentina, it does allow outsiders a valuable glimpse into the “underground” but parallel currents of creative thought there over the last three decades.
“Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Argentinean Art” runs through March 7 at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, 23rd & San Jacinto, UT campus. Call 471-7324 for info.
This article appears in February 19 • 1999 and February 19 • 1999 (Cover).