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After the Digital We Rematerialise: Distanceand Violence in the Work of Regina JosééGalindoClare Carolin

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After the Digital WeRematerialise

Distance and Violence in theWork of Regina José Galindo

Clare Carolin

Whatever the distance between an aesthetic production intended for anelite and a broad audience, that distance is never absolute and there arealways some points of contact or some sort of breaking up of distance.

1

The inseparability of an artwork from its context is a given in critical anal-ysis. Any work signifies both itself and the conditions of its production.Likewise, just as the degree to which an artwork speaks of its context mayvary depending on the intentions of the artist, so the degree to which theviewer is capable of decoding these intentions will also vary depending onhistorical and cultural position. Few would dispute that the analysis ofartworks can reveal at least some of the conditions of their production.Nevertheless, contemporary criticism and curatorship frequently overlookthe significance of context, because doing so facilitates the perpetuationof the myth of the autonomous art object whose market value can thus becorrelated with more exclusive, less intelligible, less

accessible

criteria. Inan apparently globalised artworld the technology that enables communi-cation and exchange across vast distances is increasingly inverted in theservice of such mythifications. Contemporary art thus occupies and simul-taneously perpetuates a double paradox: while the internet and contingentrecording media allow historically unprecedented access to informationand the means of dissemination, these (relatively) freely circulating dataare turned back on themselves to provide the raw material for the so-called‘research led’ practices of a growing contingent of first-world artists. Forthe most part, digital technology and digitally available data are deployedonly at the most superficial level as a resource in the critical analysis andproduction of art, while those artists for whom it is integral to their practiceremain outside the dominant discourses and nexuses of contemporary art,beyond the reach of the market.

An exception in this characterisation of the contemporary art field isGuatemalan artist Regina José Galindo, whose primary medium is

1. Oscar Masotta,

Después del pop: nosotros desmaterializamos,

in Oscar Masotta,

Revolución en el Arte: Pop-art, Happenings y arte de los medios en la década del sesenta

, Libros de Sísifo, Barcelona, 2004, p 340 [author’s translation]

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performance recorded as still and moving image. Although Galindo’swork can now be seen in commercial and not-for-profit galleries acrossEurope and the Americas, her earliest works, dating from the end of the1990s, first became internationally visible through video-sharing sites.The internet remains a key vehicle for the dissemination of Galindo’swork and it is impossible to imagine her practice or trajectory withoutthe existence of a technology that can instantly and globally circulatedocumentation of actions and performances realised for small audiencesin specific locations. Equally, any analysis of her work is meaninglesswithout reference to this technology, or to precursors whose theoriesand practices developed in response to the exponential growth of masscommunications in the latter half of the previous century. This textconfigures the interrelated concepts of

dematerialisation

and

media art

as parallel transversal lines linking experimental responses to earlycommunications media by the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, via theavant-gardes of the Americas centred on New York and Buenos Aires inthe 1960s, to a globally networked but socially, politically and economi-cally marginalised Guatemala at the turn of the twenty-first century.Central to this is the idea that distance and violence correlate with dema-terialisation and media art in so far as brute force is the most prevalentcontrol mechanism used by dominant political forces to maintain theseparation between the overdeveloped world and those outside it.

2

Galindo uses her own body to create powerful visual metaphors andsymbols for the conditions of the oppressed. In so doing, she emphasisesthat it is precisely the controlled circulation by the mass media – and byextension the institutions of contemporary visual art – of visual repre-sentations of the enactment and consequences of political violence thatendows such images with the potential to both preserve and disruptdistance.

Galindo’s position in the critical economy of the overdeveloped

2

world – the context from which I am now writing and for which in2009 I curated

Regina José Galindo: The Body of Others

, a solo exhi-bition surveying the past decade of performances, actions, photogra-phy, video and sculpture – was assured when she was awarded theGolden Lion for the Best Young Artist at the 2005 Venice Biennale.Here, as part of the exhibition

Always a Little Further

curated by RosaMartínez, she presented video documentation of performances andactions, including what is probably now considered her most emblem-atic work,

Quien puede borrar las huellas?

(Who can erase thetraces?), 2003. This performance, in which Galindo walks from Guate-mala’s Constitutional Court to the National Palace leaving a trail offootprints in human blood, protested against the unopposed presiden-tial candidacy of Efraín Ríos Montt. An ex-military leader, Montt hadbeen responsible for a coup d’état in 1982 and a presidency marked bya campaign of violence – massacres, rape, torture and scorched earthpolicies – directed predominantly against Guatemala’s indigenouspopulation. Galindo has speculated that the award was both a symp-tom and a function of the overdeveloped world’s reductive perceptionof her practice as that of a third world artist/activist. Speaking withhindsight about how the award affected her transition from relativelyunknown poet and performer to internationally acclaimed artist shesaid:

2. Here I use Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ‘overdeveloped world’ to describe those economies of ‘former’ Western Europe and North America defined by the negative consequences of overconsumption. See Paul Gilroy,

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness

, Verso, London, 1993. Also see Marcus Power,

Anti-racism, Deconstruction and ‘Overdevelopment’

, at http://pdj.sagepub.com/content/6/1/24.short?cited-by=yes&legid=sppdj;6/1/24. Power argues that contemporary mainstream development work which aims at fighting poverty, sickness and crisis in ‘underdeveloped’ regions echoes the sentiments of ‘metropolitan responsibility for distant human suffering’, which characterised imperialist and colonial movements from Europe and North America as they ‘became entwined within global networks of exchange and exploitation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’. According to Power this colonialist mindset frames the fixation with the Global North coming to the aid of ‘distant others’, an attention which he argues could equally be paid to the problems of ‘overdevelopment’ in the overdeveloped world.

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I will always keep asking myself the same question: was I awarded thisprize because my work deserved it, or because you decided at thatmoment, when the Biennale was being curated by women, that it wouldbe opportune to direct attention towards the third world?

3

Galindo’s open ambivalence suggests a kind of feedback loop in whichher own scepticism regarding her position is confirmed in the apparentlytokenistic response of the overdeveloped artworld. That said, it isprecisely the conscious refraction of the discomfort, guilty fascinationand embarrassment felt by viewers from this sphere when confrontedwith unflinching representations of the other as oppressed victim that isthe key operation in Galindo’s work. The sophistication of this opera-tion is evident in the adeptness with which Galindo selects subjects fromreal instances of conflict and reconfigures them as complex, multilayeredmetaphors that resonate with art historical and pop cultural representa-tions of violence, particularly depictions of the female body as a site forthe simultaneous enactment of brutality and fantasy. For example in2006 Galindo responded to a commission from a festival in Genoa enti-tled

Il potere delle donne

(The Power of Women) with the performance

Limpieza social

(Social Cleansing) in which she is given a pressure washwith a power hose, a method used to sterilise and humiliate newlyarrived prisoners and to quell demonstrations. The video of this perfor-mance shows a naked, diminutive Galindo gasping in pain and strug-gling to maintain her balance as she is doused by a powerful jet of waterfrom a hose wielded by a uniformed fire-fighter who literally towers overher. The two-minute piece ends with Galindo crushed by the force of thewater, choking and spluttering as she shields her face and torso fromhose and camera. A conclusion which suggests both the climax of a soft-core porn scenario and images of demonstrators subdued by policewater cannon at the anti-Globalisation protests that took place duringthe 27th G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, not far from the site of theperformance.

Other works which by contrast invoke the depiction of suffering inChristian religious painting and sculpture include

Reconocimiento de uncuerpo

(Identification of a corpse) performed in Córdoba, Argentina in2008 and one of her most visceral performances

Mientras, ellos siguenlibres

(Why are they still free?), 2007. The former refers to LatinAmerica’s

desaparecidos

(‘disappeared’), specifically to victims of stateterrorism in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s, and consists ofGalindo lying on a stretcher completely anaesthetised while her audiencelift a shroud-like sheet to ‘identify’ her body. In

Mientras, ellos siguenlibres

Galindo, eight months pregnant, lies tied to a bed in the invertedcruciform position used by the Guatemalan army during the civil war toprepare indigenous women for rape. Together with the many otherrepresentations and invocations of violence that feature in Galindo’sprolific output of the past decade these images exude a similar force tothe compulsion that both repels and attracts spectators at the scene of acrime or an accident. As such, their key function within the gallerycontext of the overdeveloped world is the affirmation and simultaneousbreaking up of the distance separating the realities of viewer and subject.

Mientras, ellos siguen libres

, Guatemala, 2007, courtesy the artist, photo: David Pérez and Aníbal López

Galindo cites Marina Abramovi

[cacute]

as a key reference for her work, andhas also pointed to Santiago Sierra and Teresa Margolles as influences,

c

3. Regina José Galindo in conversation with Clare Carolin, public event at Modern Art Oxford, 30 January 2009, on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition

Regina José Galindo: The Body of Others

, Modern Art Oxford, 31 January–29 March 2009, curated by Clare Carolin and organised by Emily Smith, recording available from Modern Art Oxford archive.

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both of whom spent extended periods in Guatemala in the late 1990swhen Galindo was developing her first performances.

4

There are clearaffinities in the practices of these artists, most obviously in terms of theirfrontal engagement with the themes of violence and exploitation asdefining characteristics of contemporary Latin American reality. Whatsets Galindo apart from her European and Mexican counterparts is herparticular approach to this subject matter: first, in terms of its unambig-uous visual immediacy (each image detonates a fast-acting retinalcharge), second, in its emotional proximity to its subject. This could bepartially attributed to the fact that, unlike Margolles and Sierra,Galindo’s performances and actions very often involve her own body,and nor does her self-implication with her subjects carry any trace of thenarcissism that characterises Abramovi

[cacute]

’s work. This may well be downto Galindo’s proximity to and consequent identification with the realitiesto which her work refers. For example in 2006 she described how

Quiénpuede borrar las huellas?

emerged from her own ‘rage and fear’:

When it was announced that Efraín Ríos Montt had managed to winacceptance as a presidential candidate, I was in my room, and I sufferedan attack of panic and depression. I shouted out, I kicked and stompedmy feet, I cursed the system that rules us. How was it possible that acharacter as dark as this would have such power with which to bendeverything to his will? I decided then and there that I would take to thestreets with my shout and amplify it. I had to do it.

5

This investment in the realities addressed by individual works appliesequally to those pieces produced beyond the immediate context ofGuatemala where it is transferred to, or becomes manifest in theresponses of audiences and participants. For example in

Reconocimento

c

4. Ibid

5. Regina José Galindo quoted at Francisco Goldman,

Regina José Galindo

, http://bombsite.com/issues/94/articles/2780

Regina José Galindo, Mientras, ellos siguen libres, Guatemala, 2007, courtesy the artist,photo: David Pérez and Aníbal López

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de un cuerpo

some of the older audience members (those who might bepresumed to be of an age to have experienced the events of the 1970sand 1980s) approach the task of ‘identifying’ Galindo’s ‘corpse’ with anair of a gravitas and contained emotion so acute as to give the impres-sion that for them the task either has real ritual significance or a cathar-tic function. Another example is the action

Curso de supervivencia parahombres y mujers que viajarán de manera ilegal a los Estados Unidos

(Survival skills course for men and women travelling illegally to theUnited States), 2008. Here Galindo collaborated with a Guatemala City-based people smuggler to assemble a group of economic migrants plan-ning to travel illegally to the United States. She then engaged a danger-ous sports instructor who taught them skills such as orientation, map-reading, fire-making, first aid and abseiling, which would be of useduring the hazardous journey. Such works are therefore defined by an

infrathin

separation between the performance or action and the realityto which it speaks. Galindo does not merely create situations and imageswith the sole aim of provoking critical commentary, but actually articu-lates a discourse within the reality on which her work acts, such that theroles of participant, observer and commentator are rolled into oneanother, and the mode of transmission itself becomes integral to theform and agency of the work. The origins of this approach can belocated in the particularities of the context from which it first emanated.

Curso de supervivencia

,

Regina José Galindo, Curso de supervivencia para hombres y mujeres que viajarán de manera ilegal a los Estados Unidos(mapeo), Guatemala, 2008, courtesy the artist, photo: Marlon Garcia

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BLUE OCTOBER AND THE GUATEMALAN CONTEXT

In 1996 Guatemala emerged from a thirty-six-year-long civil war thatclaimed over 200,000 lives and displaced more than a million people.Most of these deaths resulted from a policy of genocide directed towardsthe country’s mainly rural indigenous population, the destruction ofhundreds of Mayan villages, and the systematic murder by the US-supported Guatemalan regime of thousands of civilians. The war hadbeen provoked by the events that followed the ‘October Revolution’ of1944 led by Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, specifically his creation of a newconstitution under which censorship was brought to an end, men andwomen were declared equal before the law, racial discrimination wascriminalised, private monopolies banned and labour unions legalised. In1952 Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who succeeded Arévalo Bermejo as presi-dent, implemented sweeping agrarian reforms expropriating unusedlands set aside by private corporations and redistributing them to landlesspeasants. The reforms antagonised the US-based multinational UnitedFruit Company and in 1954 Arbenz was deposed in a CIA-sponsoredcoup. There then followed a presidential assassination, three years ofinternal troubles and finally the civil war, which ravaged the country overthree decades. It was not until 1996 that the final Peace Accords weresigned between the Guatemalan government and the GuatemalanNational Revolutionary Unity (URNG), a guerrilla umbrella organisationformed by the four revolutionary groups active in Guatemala during thisperiod and which in 1998 became a legally constituted political party.

6

Inthe aftermath of what had become the longest and most violent conflictin modern Latin American history, many of those involved with oraffected by the war turned to gang-related criminal activity. As a conse-quence contemporary Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates inLatin America with particularly elevated rates of femicide. In 2004 it wasestimated that more than half the population lives in poverty.

7

Galindo was born in Guatemala City in 1974, her childhood andadolescence thus coinciding with the most brutal and violent episodes ofthe war, specifically Ríos Montt’s regime between 1982 and 1983.Despite the fact that most of the fighting between US-aided governmentforces and the left-wing guerrilla opposition was concentrated in ruralareas, and therefore largely invisible to urban dwellers like Galindo andher family, she has described how an atmosphere of oppression and fearwas a constant during her formative years:

We grew up with the idea we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t even goout into the street without our parents worrying about us. We didn’treally understand what was going on. We just had the feeling that thewalls had ears. The previous generation of intellectuals and artists had allbeen murdered so when the peace accords were finally signed we all wentout to the streets to demonstrate.

8

As Galindo highlights here, among the many disastrous consequences ofthe civil war was the obliteration of a generation of artists and intellectualswho were murdered or exiled, resulting in the atrophy of Guatemala’scultural infrastructure. During the late 1990s the independent curatorRosina Cazali was running Colloquia, one of a handful of independentcultural initiatives active in Guatemala City at that time. She has described

6. For an account of art produced in Guatemala during this period see Joanne Bernstein, ‘Resistance and Repression: A Background to the Conflicts’, in Joanne Bernstein,

Tierra de Tempestades, Land of Tempests: New Art from Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua

, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, 1994

7. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pop_bel_pov_lin-economy-population-below-poverty-line

8. Regina José Galindo in conversation with Clare Carolin, op cit

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how in the years immediately following the signing of the Peace Accords,almost from one day to the next, this cultural void was filled by a highlyvisible explosion of NGO-supported activity. One of the key manifesta-tions of this activity was Octubre Azul (Blue October), a festival of contem-porary visual art programmed by Cazali and José Osorio that took placeevery day in the month of October 2000 and was named in double refer-ence to the October Revolutions of 1917 and 1944. In the absence of spacesdesignated for cultural activities Octubre Azul and events like it werestaged in the public spaces that had become no-go zones during the yearsof conflict. Yet as Cazali explains, this was not just out of expediency, butalso a direct response to the kind of work that artists were producing:

We were so naive then but it was clear to us that artists should besupported in beginning to make these public manifestations and actions.No one had told them but they understood that the main scenario waspublic space. In this case the historic centre of downtown Guatemala City[where] public demonstrations take place and people meet to protest… InGuatemala it’s very emblematic that artists took over this space and thatit served as a basis for their work.

9

When one comes to consider the impetus for Galindo’s characteristiccombination of instantly arresting imagery and contextually resonantperformance, it seems significant that the frameworks for her earlypieces were so radically non-institutional. As mentioned above by bothCazali and Galindo the site for these performances literally was ‘thestreet’. This raw approach is further compounded by Galindo’s autodi-dacticism, a consequence of the fact that at this stage in her earlytwenties, when under different circumstances she might have attendedart school, she was unable to do so because none existed in Guatemala.Thus at the point when she produced her first performances she wasworking in an advertising agency and writing poetry, a combination ofactivities which she describes as resulting in an easy, almost intuitivetransition to performance in public space:

Because I had this experience in advertising of synthesising ideas withtheir graphic expression it was just a question of switching from thissuperficial field and coming up with ideas of greater depth that expressedwhat I really wanted to say… I would write a poem and then look for animage and then the performance came.

10

One such example is

Lo voy a gritar al viento

(I’ll shout it to the wind),1999, a performance in which Galindo, dressed in a white robe resem-bling a choirboy’s chasuble, hangs suspended from the arch of the postoffice building in the historic centre of Guatemala City reading poemswhich she then tears from a notepad and throws to the crowd below.Galindo has mentioned that the work, in which the sound of her readingis lost in the ambient noise of the city, refers to the fact that women’svoices go unheard in Latin America’s macho culture. Characteristicallythe effectiveness of the piece derives from its invitation to multiple inter-pretations. Another possible reading is that the suspended white robedfigure is a secular angel, perhaps an evocation of Walter Benjamin’sangel of history who ‘sees one single catastrophe which keeps pilingwreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’.

11

The inspira-

9. Rosina Cazali, in

Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art on Video

, First Year Students on Curating Contemporary Art MA, RCA, eds, Royal College of Art, London, 2009, p 21

10. Regina José Galindo in conversation with Clare Carolin, op cit

11. Walter Benjamin,

Thesis of the Philosophy of History

, http://www.efn.org/

∼

dredmond/Theses_on_History.html

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tion for the passage in Benjamin’s

Thesis on the Philosophy of History

isPaul Klee’s painting

Angelus Novus

(1940), a depiction of an angelwhose European features express dumb astonishment as he impotentlyspreads his wings in front of a catastrophe occurring elsewhere, beyondthe frame of the painting. By contrast Galindo’s wingless angel railsinaudibly above the chaotic and polluted urban centre where the cata-strophic consequences of a colonial past are visible everywhere: from thecrumbling baroque edifice from which Galindo is suspended, to theshabbily dressed crowd who scramble after the scraps of paper as ifunder the impression that they were banknotes falling from heaven (forthis location happens also to be a centre for illegal money exchanges),and the photographers who jostle to capture an image of the spectacle.

In

Lo voy a gritar al viento

the body of the artist is set against theurban context in such a way as to invite responses that affect a reversalof the spectacle with reality. A further example of this operation can beseen in

No perdemos nada con nacer

(We lose nothing by being born), inwhich Galindo had herself dumped in a transparent plastic bag at amunicipal landfill site. The performance, which was realised first inGuatemala City in 2000 and repeated in Mexico City the following year,comments on the discovery of human corpses in such locations. Thebanal regularity of such events is reflected in the nonchalant responses ofthe dump workers who ‘discover’ Galindo’s ‘corpse’, and further ampli-fied in the casual, unconcerned attitudes of the photographers whorecord the scene.

Lo voy a gritar al viento

, 1999

Regina José Galindo, Lo voy a gritar al viento, Guatemala, 1999, courtesy the artist, photo: Roni Mocan

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ART OBJECTS AND REVOLUTIONS

Cazali has explained how the period when actions and performances inpublic spaces came to define the emergent Guatemalan art scene of thelate 1990s was marked by a complicity between the artist performersand event organisers, and the photographers working on behalf of thecountry’s national newspapers:

The photographers from the papers all knew us and they were alwaysrunning after us… because they knew the resulting images were going tobe so strong, and in some cases so beautiful, that they would immediatelyend up on the front pages.

12

Compared with the machinations behind the art productions of the over-developed world where the media’s attention is solicited as a matter ofcourse, it seems remarkable that the basis for this relationship waslargely, if not entirely, unpremeditated. According to Cazali the photog-raphers, who pursued these artists like paparazzi tailing celebrities,neither cared nor knew that they were photographing art, while theartists responded by creating photogenic scenarios whose open addressto casual bystanders was an expression of locality that the photogra-phers in turn transformed into news. Is this seemingly ingenuous media-friendly quality of Galindo’s work the key mechanism that facilitated thetransmission of these vernacular works into the international sphere? Isit instructive to think of her practice not in terms of a specifically LatinAmerican performance art lineage continuing the trajectory establishedby Anna Mendieta, with whom she is often compared? Rather, instead,as more closely aligned with the conception of ‘media art’ elaborated bythe Argentinian critic Oscar Masotta in the short period of freneticcultural activity and political upheaval that followed the 1966 militarycoup of Juan Carlos Ongana, and ended at the turn of the decade withthe intensification of political violence and the repression of Argentina’scultural and intellectual producers.

According to Masotta ‘media art’ consists of artists’ actions andperformances realised specifically for the mass media – a tendencywhich, he argued, followed logically from the hyper-materiality of Popand the immediacy of Happenings which during the late 1960s hadbecome the predominant, even defining manifestation of the Argentinianavant-garde. As Masotta writes in the prologue to his 1967 book

Happenings

:

… while the Happening is an art of the immediate, the art of the mediawould be an art of mediations given that mass communication implies

spatial distance

between those who receive and the things themselves, theobjects, situations or events to which information refers.

13

[emphasis inthe original]

At the time when he wrote this text, and the books and essays throughwhich his theories of media art and dematerialisation are elaborated,Masotta was connected with the Instituto Di Tella

14

in Buenos Aires. Fora brief and intense period during the late 1960s the Institute was thenexus of the Argentine avant-garde and its international affiliates, andthe site of many of the events that became the subjects of Masotta’s

12. Rosina Cazali, op cit, p 21

13. Oscar Masotta, Prologue to

Happenings

, in Inés Katzenstein, ed,

Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde

, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2004, p 181

14. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instituto_Di_Tella

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analysis. Today what is most striking about Masotta’s theorisation ofthen contemporary art is not so much the broad range of sources fromwhich he draws (encompassing semiology and psychoanalysis), but hisown hyper-awareness of his peripheral position in relation to Europeanand North American discourse and cultural production. For example in1966, having never seen a work of British or North American Pop art,Masotta wrote a book on the subject based entirely on the analysis ofreproductions of British and North American works and direct encoun-ters with derivative pieces by Argentine artists.

15

The same year, return-ing to Buenos Aires after the trip to New York on which he encounteredhis first Pop works, Masotta organised a cycle of re-enacted happeningsby Carolee Schneemann, Claes Oldenburg and Michael Kirby at theInstituto Di Tella. In his post facto reflections on these exercises his driv-ing preoccupation is the means by which the distance that separatescultural forms can be traversed, and the slippages and alternative read-ings produced by the technologies that contract space and time. Byimplication, distance itself becomes Masotta’s main subject and it is herethat the concept of a dematerialised media art is instrumental.

Masotta’s first use of the term dematerialisation occurs in a lecturedelivered at the Instituto Di Tella in 1967,

Después del pop: nosotrosdesmaterializamos

(After Pop: We Dematerialise). Published the follow-ing year under the same title, the piece begins by quoting from an essayof 1926, ‘The Future of the Book’ by the Soviet avant-gardist ElLissitzky, which Masotta had encountered republished in the journal

New Left Review

in 1967: ‘The idea that moves the masses today ismaterialism: however, it is dematerialization that characterizes thetimes.’ The essence of Lissitzky’s argument was the idea that:

… as correspondence grows, so the number of letters, the quantity ofwriting paper, the mass of material of supply grow until they are relievedby the radio. Matter diminishes, we dematerialize, sluggish masses ofmatter are replaced by liberated energy.

16

The question for revolutionaries in the 1920s had been how to makebooks after the advent of radio. That is, how could the revolutionharness the liberated energy within the material of a given message – beit radio or printed matter? Returning to this predicament some fortyyears later, Masotta argued that in the midst of the climate of technolog-ical glorification that defined the 1960s, the impact of the mass mediaand popular culture was processed ‘in the best works’, not through refer-ence or citation of images from television, cinema and advertising to theicons of mass culture (as occurs in Pop art), but as medium, techniqueand materiality in the form of non-object-based works such as Happen-ings. The fact that such works existed purely as image and informationenabled them to occupy the space established by the mass media. ForMasotta the key distinction between a Happening and work of media artwas thus that while the former could be aligned to theatre in so far as itrequired ‘spectators’ in order to exist, a work of media art could ‘beginwithout the need to gather an audience’.

17

In

Después del pop: nosotros desmaterializamos

this proposition iselaborated with reference to one of Masotta’s own Happenings,

Elmensaje fantasma

(The Ghost Image). This consisted of an action

15. H. Oscar Masotta,

El Pop Art

, Editorial Columba, Buenos Aires, 1967

16. El Lissitzky quoted in Oscar Masotta,

Después del pop: nosotros desmaterializamos

, p 335

17. Ibid, p 375

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whereby, on 16 and 17 July 1967, Masotta put up posters in a centralarea of Buenos Aires bearing the message ‘This poster will be broadcaston Channel 11 Television on July 20’. Then on 20 July, during two ten-second slots purchased through an advertising agency, the text wasbroadcast in a typeface identical to that used on the posters, while on thesoundtrack a voice proclaimed: ‘This medium announces the appearanceof a poster the text of which we are now projecting.’ Masotta concludesby highlighting the fact that while the

El mensaje fantasma

used themedia of advertising it was distinguished from this mode by twofeatures. First, because its audience was clearly undefined; second,because as the work ended on July 20 it ‘revealed its “finality withoutend”’. Masotta ends the essay and his analysis of

El mensaje fantasma

by observing that:

… its specific purpose was to invert the usual relationship between thecommunications media and the content communicated. Here, and in areciprocal and circular way, each medium revealed the presence of theother and its own presence was revealed by the other.

18

After 1967 the notion of dematerialisation is pursued in two radicallydifferent directions; first within the Argentinian context by Masotta’scompatriots; second, by the American critic and curator Lucy Lippard,who in February 1968 published the article ‘The Dematerialization ofArt’ in

Art International

‘in which we saw “ultra-conceptual art” emerg-ing from two directions: art as idea and art as action’.

19

Lippard’s mostcomprehensive account of the notion of dematerialisation appears in

SixYears: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972

, firstpublished in 1973. Although its longer title proclaims that the remit of

Six Years

is ostensibly the Americas, Europe, England, Australia andAsia, its principle focus is squarely on North America and Europe.Applied in this context it is the notion of a dematerialised art objectexemplified primarily in the work of post-Fluxus conceptual artists suchas Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt and Douglas Huebler. In Lippard’s handsthe concept thus becomes a symptomatic expression of the politicalconvulsions of the late 1960s and early 1970s, rather than a tool ofaesthetic praxis at the service of revolution along the lines, for instance,of the group Black Mask who were active in New York at this time butwhose identification of revolutionary theory with the practice took theform of politico-artistic demonstrations, for example attempting to closedown the Museum of Modern Art.

20

Such practices certainly conformedto Lippard’s definition of dematerialised art as ‘action’ or ‘idea’ butapparently either did not square with her interests, or simply slippedunder her critical radar.

By contrast in Argentina the notion of dematerialisation assumedmore radical manifestations which, as Ana Longoni and Mariano Mest-man have described, reached their apotheosis and nemesis simulta-neously in 1968 with Tucumán Arde, in which the Rosario Group ofartists joined with labour unions to protest against workers’ conditionsin the province of Tucumán and bring them to the attention of the widerpublic.

21

The project, which was conceived of as an intervention in masscommunication, a circuit of counter-information against the propagandaof the dictatorship, was closed within hours of opening in Buenos Airesdue to government pressure and led to the decision of the members of

18. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’,

Art International

vol 12, no 2, Zurich, February 1968

19.

Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mention of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia and Asia (with occasional political overtones)

, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997

20. For a full account of the activities of the Black Mask group see

Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Incomplete Works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea and the Black Mask Group

, Unpopular Books and Sabotage Editions, London, 1993.

21. For an account of this period see Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, ‘After Pop: We Dematerialise: Oscar Masotta, Happenings and Media Art at the Beginnings of Conceptualism’, in Katzenstein, op cit, pp 156–172.

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the Rosario Group to abandon art in favour of direct action. Withoutdoubt Masotta had in mind this sequence of events when in 1969,against the background of intensifying political violence in Argentina,and a year before the closure of the Instituto Di Tella he wrote:

… works of the mass communications media are susceptible – because oftheir very concept and structure – to receiving political content; I meanfrom the left, truly convulsive, capable of merging a ‘revolutionary praxis’with an ‘aesthetic praxis’… They will not be objects for the archives of thebourgeoisie but subjects for a post-revolutionary consciousness.

22

THE DEMATERIALISATION OF THE LIVE ARTIST

23

During the forty-odd years that separate Masotta’s utopian reflectionsfrom the present day, sweeping changes brought about by the revolutionin digital computing and communication technology have affected thecomplete transformation of the mass media field, so much so that theterm itself now seems anachronistic. In order to appear distinctive, or toappear at all, today’s contemporary artists must produce works againstthe grain of media saturation and information overload. As described inthe opening section of this text, this has resulted in a situation in whichthose working inside the mechanisms of digital technologies are paradox-ically invisible within the dominant discourses driving the object-basedart market where arcane analogue technologies such as sixteen-millimetrefilm and slide projection are fetishised by those who can afford them andstringent copyright restrictions prevail. Within this context the distinc-tiveness of Galindo’s practice derives in part from the fact that her earlywork completely bypassed this digital double consciousness, shiftingfrom the urban public spaces in which they were performed directly intothe larger public space of the World Wide Web via video-sharing sites.

As the context for the production and reception of Galindo’s workhas expanded internationally, so her position within her own practicehas shifted from lone protagonist in the early works produced in CentralAmerica such as

Quién puede borrar las huellas?

to orchestrator of theactions of others in

Curso de supervivencia para hombres y mujeres queviajarán de manera ilegal a los Estados Unidos

, to complete corporealabsence in the most recent works, which nevertheless still stronglyinvoke the presence of a human body. Two examples of this tendencywhich take the form of conventional sculptures are

La Conquista / ‘TheConquest’, 2009, a wig made from the hair of women from the Indiansub-continent, displayed like a trophy in reference to the legacies of colo-nialism; and Busto (Bust) 2009, a classical self-portrait bust in heroic,Socialist Realist style described by Galindo as ‘an experiment inapproaching the human body from another perspective’ presented at the10th Havana Biennale in 2009.24Busto, 2009, X Havana Biennale, Cuba, courtesy the artist, photograph Patrick HamiltonThis trajectory – whereby Galindo develops a radical, performance-based practice characterised by highly arresting imagery (perceived assensationalist in mass media terms and ‘political’ in art-critical terms),rapidly achieves international success and then effectively ‘dematerialises’as a live artist, rematerialising the art object as commodity in imitation ofthe human form – might thus be read as a reversal of Masotta’s processof dematerialisation at the service of utopian revolutionary praxis. A

22. Oscar Masotta, Conciencia y Estructura, pp 14–15, quoted in Katzenstein, op cit, p 167

23. The title for this section is borrowed from Stewart Home’s review of the exhibition ‘Regina José Galindo: The Body of Others’ at Modern Art Oxford, Regina José Galindo and the Dematerialisation of the Live Artist 1999–2009, http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/374

24. Email correspondence between Regina José Galindo and Clare Carolin, March 2009

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reading which might be emphasised byGalindo’s fulsome rejection of the over-developed world’s reading of her practiceas ‘activist’, because for her:

… there is a world of differencebetween being an artist with a clearpolitical position and being an activ-ist… If I had wanted to be an activist Iwould have followed in my father’sfootsteps and become a lawyer work-ing with human rights. I wouldn’t bewasting my time as an artist wearingan activist’s mask.25

Galindo’s position on the question of thecommodity status of her work isexpressed in equally direct terms. In fact,like her unflinchingly confrontationalimagery, her attitude to the gallerysystem is so extremely unaffected that itcircumvents any theoretical rejoinder,sharply closing the distance between theoverdeveloped world and those outside itby forcing the existence of that distanceinto sight. Asked in front of an audienceassembled to view the exhibition of herwork whether she felt that documenta-tion of her performances and actionspresented in such a context was lessauthentic than an encounter with the realthing in time and space she replied in thenegative:

I never make a performance without documenting it because I am inter-ested in inserting myself into the first world through the creation of aneconomic object. That’s the way I earn money and get something inreturn from you in the same the same way you have obtained somethingfrom us.26

25. Regina José Galindo in conversation with Clare Carolin, op cit

26. Ibid

Regina José Galindo, Busto, Havana, 2009, courtesy the artist,photo: Patrick Hamilton

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