Of Temples and Bunkers: Transition's "New Images"

• In Event: Producciones visuales y críticas durante el tránsito de las dictaduras a las democracias en Argentina y Brasil

Abstract

In late 1983, as Raúl Alfonsín's democratic regime was transitioning into power, Jorge Glusberg organized the Homenaje de las artes visuales a la democracia on behalf of the Asociación Argentina de Críticos de Arte in multiple venues around Buenos Aires. This project, linked to the Centro de Arte y Comunicación's "Sessions for Democracy," included CAYC's La Nueva Imagen de los Ochenta, one of several exhibitions of transavangardia, or neo-expressionist painting, coordinated by Glusberg in the early 1980s. My paper will argue that Glusberg, who in the 1970s aspired to claim the conceptualist arte de sistemas of CAYC for Argentina, sought in this later moment to associate transavangardia with the transition to democracy. By Glusberg's logic of "the new image," transavangardia's emphasis on individualist gesture and postmodernist stylistic hybridity would embody the country's new values and liberation from dictatorship. My aim will be to contextualize this ideological positioning of 1980s painting through some of the alternatives in the Homenaje projects: Marta Minujín’s El Partenón de Libros, a metal scaffolding adorned with some 20,000 books, including titles censored during the dictatorship, and former arte de sistemas mainstay Juan Carlos Romero's censored attempt to draw attention to disappearances.

Author

• Daniel R Quiles, Art Institute of Chicago