Archive to the Left

"Let them call our work propaganda, terrorism, or guerilla warfare. We hope to be able to participate in all this and even if we´re unsucessful, at least there is more creativeness, more life more love in the mere attempt than in all the ´works of art´which only serve to lull the mind and sensibility."
Coordinating Committee of the Revolutionary Imagination, Buenos Aires 1969

From the archives on Tucuman Arde at CeDINCI. Spent the day at this space which holds an amazing archive on movements, history, philosophy, literary production of the left. In ´68 in protest to the censorship of an artwork in a show on the avante garde, called "Experiencia 68" organized at the Del Di Tella Institute, artists burnt, destroyed and threw work into the streets in protest. After this show artists formed a collective and decided to abandon art institutions and work in solidarity with social movements. This collective spent time in a province in Argentina called Tucuman. working with the local population, they produced photo murals, handwritten signs, banners, tape recordings,films, slideshows, distriuted flyerersand encouraged dialogue in an exhibit called Tucuman Arde which transformed an exhibit into a political act. Police shut down the show and the collective decides to operate in both a legal framework and in a clandestine manner as a strategy to prevent the suppression of their work.


http://www.cedinci.org/principal.html

Party in Chacaritas

Party at curator Santiago Navarro´s

Arte, Vino y Risas

Jennifer Sternad Flores has been an amazing hostess. She's introduced me to a number of artists, curators, writers in Buenos Aires. Most doing actions and public interventions. Jen's been doing amazing research about political art, street actions in Buenos Aires. Watch out LA, when she goes back in September she´ll returned well armed.
We´ve gone to dinner a few times, had great food,wine and conversation.
Photo #1: Jen and artist Alicia Herrero. www.aliciaherrero.com.ar
Photo #2
Luis Lux Lindner, artist writer contributor to Ramona a journal of contemporary art criticism in Buenos Aires. www.ramona.org.ar and public interventionist, Andrea Cavagnaro.

San Telmo Part 2

Argentinos have clean asses

San Telmo

San Telmo´s an older neighborhood. In one of the plaza they have an antiques market on Sundays. The plaza and surrounding street get packed with vendors, street performers, portenos and tourists.

Escrache

Performers at an escrache. In the mid 90's activists developed this tactic to denounce government members of the dictatorship guilty of kidnapping, torture and the murder of dissidents. A number of collectives arose, such as HIJOS, Etcetera, mesas de escrache and these actions have developed into visual and sonic spectacles. Protestors gather in front of the business, or home of a businessman, a politician or some other abuser of power and basically "out" them in a fun carnivalesque manner:theater,performance, music/noise, chants, banners, signs. This was a smaller escrache. I'm told sometimes there are over a thousand people participating. This one happened outside of the offices of a company named Telefonica and it's owner (yes power has names and faces) was being denounced for labor abuses.

Pop Art in Latin America

Jennifer and art historian, Ana Longoni in a cafe near the University of Buenos Aires. The night before I attended a talk Longoni gave in conjunction with a show on Litchenstein at MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). Longoni's done much work on street art, art as action, and the relationship of art groups/colletives to larger liberation movements in South America from the 60's to the present. She works with a number of cultural and art critics wh are rewriting Latin American history not as an echo of Europe's vanguard, but are developing other parameters of discussing/exploring this relationship between the "centers and peripheries" such as looking at this relationship in terms of conflict and simultaneity. In this talk she focused on what she called three examples of "subversions of pop" in Latin America:1) Argentina in the 60's: media interventions, graphics that used the language of pop and spaces of publicity, a sort of anti-happening--a fraudulent media hoax, etc. 2)Chile in the 60's-70's--silkscreen-aesthetics of repetition, popular iconography, the dissemination of images in mass that complimented, fed a growing popular radicalization/ critique of power that had relations with the communist party. Longoni pointed out how this use pf pop forms and aesthetics was embedded in larger social movements. 3)Peru in the70's- Longoni showed the work of a collective who utilized the form of comics to reach to indigenous campesino that addressed issues like agrarian reform. Another important overiding theme was the relevance of looking at the work of these artists and collectives in relationship to the political contexts of dictatorship, repression, and emerging social movements. The use of pop, was a strategy embedded with an optimism, a populist approach to art. There are so many exciting, relevant possible conversations, connections and parallels with this history and Chicano Art. Longoni's lecture and conversations with Jennifer have made me realize that Chicano art needs to be talked about in relationship to political art, aesthetics and practices happenning internationally. Chicano art really has a lot to contribute to these vibrant conversations that are very much alive and active here in Argentina.

More graff

Mercosur, Fidel, Chavez and the Blockade

Today's headline in one of the Buenos Aires newspapers:
a selected translation:
The Mercosur cumbre: Accord is signed to relieve Cuba from the economic blockade. This is the first accord Cuba has achieved with a commercial block since the times of the Soviet Union. With this accord, Mercosur mocks the blockade imposed on Havana by the United States in 1962. Some believe that if US displomacy, now trapped in the war in the Middle East, was more attentive to their backyard this accord wouldn't have passed. The Cuban economy has grown 11% in the last four years according to it's own statististics and 5% according to Cepal. The nickel industry, tourism and the exportation of medicines are the driving forces for the country who has it's worst harvest of sugar in a century. Chavez is sending oil at $25 a barrel to the island where as the international rate of oil is at $75.

Graffiti in BA

Not much wildstyle influenced graff here. much of the graff here is straight up political, denouncing violence internally and externally (plenty of anti yanqui graff) and anouncing actions..more use of stencils than letters.

The Death of the Belmont Tunnels

Tractors tearing down the walls of a vital cultural monument in LA, the Belmont Tunnels, a home to many graffiti artists on the Eastside..a vital form/ language sprung amidst the devastation of crack and guns in our neighborhoods which wiped out many of our brothers and sisters from the mid 90's on. Let us not forget how that wuz funneled in by US backed Contras (check out http://www.albionmonitor.com/9811a/copyright/webbcrackup.html for more info.). I strongly believe that graff needs to be talked about in relation to the political, economic and cultural shifts going on in L.A. at the time. The importance of the pink, blue, toxic green jagged, swilrly visual words and letters that transformed our landscape takes on new meanings.

Meanwhile on the other side of downtown, in the parking lot of the American Hotel (next door to another LA landmark, Al's Bar, the crew, UTI has just covered ta yard they've been occupying for 15 years and busting new ...brighter, louder, more vibrant than ever.

Fort Worth to Buenos Aires

Left L.A. on Monday. I had a 2 hour stopover in Dallas/FortWorth. wuz plannining on entertaining myself by drinking beers with cowboy business men in the airport bar, but was very mistaken. no three piece suits and cowboy hat fashion, instead I ran into a swarm of troops just about to be shipped out to Iraq... the airport lobby filled with fresh faced
Woke up to an incredible sunset above vast uninhabited land. wuz reminded of how much space, land and resources there are in the americas.

East LA's on Fire

Joe of Aztlan Underground at the Farce of July, Self Help Graphics. AUG's back as a full band, lots of distortion mixed with indigenous noises and Aztlan Undergrounds always strong and relevant lyrics.

Gabi M. Curating at the HearGallery

Check out my new work at the Hear Gallery. I'm showing some mural sized xeroxes under black lites. The work should be up till the end of the month unless the xeroxes get trashed by bumping and grinding hipsters.
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=15930154

South Central, Santa Monica and Culver City

William Acedo and artist Eloy Torrez and at SCION Gallery in Culver City
Artists Harry Gamboa and Xavier Cazares Cortez at their show at Patricia Correia Gallery in Santa Monica
Curators Naomi Bass and Joy Anderson at MOVE! Housing and the Struggle for a Livable L.A. at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research

The Art of California Labor at El Pueblo Gallery

Red Ray, Ernesto de la Loza and Andres Amaya at opening