The paradox between acceptance and dissent goes a long way towards providing an explanation for the origins of a particular form of narrating what happened to art in the 1960s. At any rate, this is what Thomas Crow believes when he describes the circumstances surrounding the field of art in the United States in the face of a new and highly provocative art which nonetheless was quick to find a market. The markedly insipid reaction of the general public towards this new and successful style points to the contradiction inherent to the phenomenon of the cutting edge. Growth and optimism in an imperfect universe marked by dramatic civil and military conflicts. Crow’s take on the situation also proves to be an effective way of narrating the unfolding of the 1960s in Argentina: a decade branded by the rise and fall of a politico-economic model. At a domestic level, there was the modernization of industry, the rise of the middle classes, an opening up to international markets, freedom and a new cultural impulse and also, the military coup of 1966, censorship, the ‘Cordobazo’ (the popular uprising in the city of Córdoba which was brutally crushed by the military on the orders of Onganía’s government) and the unease among students and unions. Abroad, the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam War, the struggle for human rights, the French May Movement… All this and much more took place, each event leaving its mark on the way people understood society and art.

Meanwhile, Buenos Aires was also experiencing a process of growth. The artists of the vanguard challenged convention with an art which cast off tradition and aspired to be enjoyed by all. Most of the time, they did not achieve this, sparking controversy and polemics instead. However, the 1960s were the hay days for art and its market: there was a project to modernize the institutions under way and one of its undisputed stars was the Torcuato Di Tella Institute. Today, fifty years after it was created, both the light and shadow it cast have been the subject of intense critical study and the paradoxes it represented have been analyzed. However, there is unanimity as to its relevance at the time and the scope of its projects, particularly when we see the effect these continue to have on the present. In fact, many of the trends it set and the artists that passed through the doors of its art centers in Florida street are now the most representative of contemporary art in Argentina today.

At the Di Tella Institute, culture was managed efficiently by means of interdisciplinary consultation, corporate sponsorship and international promotional activities.

Arte60 shows four trends which characterized art in the 1960s in the collections put together by Angel Guido Art Project: free abstract art, informalism, neo-abstract art and pop art. These styles were each presented, nurtured or prized at the Di Tella Institute during the polemic and oft-remembered years of its existence.


Abstract art

By the end of the 1950s, Abstract Art had already provoked a number of skirmishes. The most recent one, Concrete Art, was in the process of becoming a style of modernity which reached out to embrace design and its industrial environment. Since then, abstract art had challenged a largely traditional audience, used to the presence of a narrative. But it had not yet called into check good taste, as Informalism was shortly to do. In opposition to the good form of the Modernist movement, the Informalists pressed for the stain, the spill, the brush stroke of pure material or of waste transformed into pictorial anti-matter. Part of the intentions harbored by the Informalists was goaded by the renewed presence of Surrealism. In 1956, the Venice Biennial paid Max Ernst its highest accolade, while four years earlier, in 1952, the critic Aldo Pellegrini –also a Surrealist poet – invited two groups of artists to unite their efforts under the same banner of Modern Artists of Argentina. These groups included the artists formerly linked to the Concrete-Invention Art Association (Maldonado, Hlito, Prati, Iommi and Girola) and another group of independent artists (José Antonio Fernández Muro, Sarah Grilo, Miguel Ocampo and Hans Aebi). This new denomination of the Modern encompassed different visions of abstract art that had overcome the militant geometrics of Concrete Art. Free abstraction was born as orthodoxy was left behind, the lines sketched by hand and the use of subjective ranges of color. Pellegrini also gathered a heterogenous group of artists around him in 1957 under the common denominator of free abstraction: seven abstract painters (Rómulo Macció, Clorindo Testa, Josefina Robirosa, Kasuya Sakai, Marta Peluffo, Osvaldo Borda and Víctor Chab).  A year later, the poet Julio Llinás organized the group Boa – a paraphrasing of COBRA – the Argentine branch of the international Phases group, founded in Paris by Edouard Jaguer, also a poet. He proposed grouping together artists from different branches of poetry arising from the encounter between Surrealism and Lyrical Abstraction.

Long live the painting of the imaginary! declared Jaguer, adhering to the principles of freedom, humor and poetry, the bases of the Surrealist movement.

In 1959 the Informalist Movement was launched, made up of Kenneth Kemble, Alberto Greco, Enrique Barilari, Olga López, Fernando Maza, Mario Pucciarelli, Towas, Luis Wells, and the photographer Jorge Roiger. The Informalist experience was not particularly vast, but the sheer force of its ‘anti-aesthetic radicalism’ engendered a number of subsequent trends. Informalism opened the doors to experiments with materials that did away with the principles of form. Hence its freedom to affirm the supremacy of material and the actual physical body handling it. The collage was the method Informalism used to burst onto the stage using materials outside the realms of painting tradition, moving away from representation per se.

However, “physical phenomena express states of emotional well-being” according to Mario Pucciarelli, the winner of the First National Prize of the first edition of the Di Tella Awards in 1960. “Inside we can sometimes feel eaten up, other times destroyed: some days we feel blue, other grey: both color and form are able to express our most intimate feelings.” The absence of man probably contributed to the audience’s sense of unease at the time, all the more so when his very presence was implied by the signs of action on degraded matter of dubious origin and an innately precarious existence. It was precisely Neo-figurative art, the movement that came immediately afterwards, which sought to return to the image of man by using a figuration that took advantage of the plastic and expressive qualities of Informalist Abstract Art. In the international context, during the second half of the 20th century, Existentialism nourished both Informalists and Neo-figurative artists in their search for that elusive image which would fill the cracks and fissures left by the war.

Many artists, if only briefly, adhered to the Informalist vision. Artists such as Antonio Seguí, Dalila Puzzovio and Rogelio Polesello made their first public appearances with works that were about gesture and matter.

Alongside Informalism and its derivatives lived other abstract manifestations of a Geometry characterized by the analysis of the mechanisms of visual perception. In 1958, the Optic-Kinetic artist VíctorVassarely held an exhibition in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum of Fine Arts), causing quite a stir in Buenos Aires society at the time. In parallel, Julio Le Parc was in the throes of founding the Groupe de Recherche de Art Visuel (Visual Arts Research Group) with his European contemporaries in Paris, giving new meaning to the research undertaken by Vassarely. In Buenos Aires, the Generative Art movement, the brainchild of Eduardo Mac Entyre and Miguel Angel Vidal, was inaugurated at the Peuser Gallery in 1960 while other artists such as Manuel Espinosa and Carlos Silva, intensified the independence of their art.

Optic Art was one of the paths taken by the concept of participation which was so characteristic of the 1960s. Virtual movement, insinuated by unstable sets of figure-background, juxtaposed patterns of lines and other visual effects which intrigued people from the point of view of materials and machines. “The eye replies”, “The eye thinks”, chanted these experiences which struck echoes in the studies being carried out into the psychology of perception and semiotics. Both approaches revealed the collaboration carried out at an interpretative level which each and every individual practices when contemplating a work. In fact, the role of the contemplator was brought into jeopardy when he/she was obliged to become a participant through the use of his/her capacity for perception – Optic and Kinetic art – and because he/she found himself having to play and live through the different aesthetic experiences offered by happenings and ‘ambientations’.


Pop art

“Art is for everyone” sang the sixties in the optimistic climate of the first half of the decade. This optimism was based on economic growth, the meteoric rise of the middle classes and new conditions which fostered contact with a lifestyle synonymous with international modernism. Thus the media had a powerful role to play: Radio and print media, television with its ‘brought to you live from…’ format ―which exponentially expanded the boundaries of information dissemination ― current affairs magazines, all generated a sense of reality, creating fashions, keeping people up-to-date with changing customs, marking new tendencies in the consumption of culture. Towards 1966, an innovative trend emerged which was expressed through the confluence of different styles emerged: pop art, Argentine pop. Whereas international pop art reflected the globalized conditions of a contemporary world, each individual urban popular culture had its own icons and idiosyncrasies. In our environment, the objects and internal décor of the time spoke of the desire for sexual liberation. At the time, the identity of sexual genre seemed to be coming apart at the seams. A gay aesthetic was, rather timidly, raising its head above the parapet, eager to worship hedonism, sophistication, the artificial and a cult taste for all things kitsch. This small anecdote is actually very telling. Artists became the stars of mass consumption and the daily trappings of life took on shades of the epic. Fashion and decoration, traditionally applied arts were seen as vital experiences which communicated as much, if not more than, art itself. They were about a lifestyle, and they proposed specific images of a contemporary world.

An aesthetic which rose from advertising and consumption, subcultures and comic strips invaded the art of the times. With a haughty irreverence, many artists scorned the collective identity symbolized in the national flag and swore allegiance to another flag without frontiers, blue jeans and all things unisex. Youth reigned supreme while lust for excitement spurred adventure. Psychedelic art proposed the liberation of consciousness to enter a realm of creativity without restrictions. The image produced by altered perceptions also moved into advertising.

New materials such as plastic and acrylic became synonymous with modernity and were also used in a widespread fashion in art and design.

The poster, a graphic work designed for mass consumption, communicated and decorated the homes of a middle class avid for the new. Decoration, installations and the combination of different media were the results of the many forms of experimentation carried out over those years.


Retrospective

The second half of the decade brought with it a veritable wave of questions and polemics between the artists themselves and also the institutions. The political situation following the coup in 1966 led to greater tension and unease spilled over into the public domain, including culture. The validity of the vanguard and its sphere of influence on society were issues which led to a complete reconfiguration of the artistic field. Something was coming to an end… But even so, experimentation, the true paradigm of the times did not properly cease until well into the 1970s. The provocation inherent to an anti-conformist or libertarian attitude, the interdisciplinary nature of an art in which fashion, design, visual arts, poetry and advertising converged are peculiar to the 1960s, a decade whose re-signified survival can be seen in art today.
This is without a doubt, part of the heritage of the era of dissent. Towards 1970, the art centers of the Di Tella Institute in Florida street were closed. But although they were closed to the public, they were opened to history and legend. To myth, as understood by Roland Barthes: to an oral state of reality which as such is open to the appropriation of society itself.