CROSSROADS OF THE LATIN AMERICAN PERFORMANCE
By Silvio De Gracia
By Silvio De Gracia
To speak of art-action or performance art in Latin America is referring to practices that historically have been ignored, rejected and devaluated, both for the institutional system of art as well as for not a very receptive social environment to proposals potentially subversive. It is hardly surprising that the history of Latin American art action has not still been written, but rather it remains dispersed and foreshadowed in articles and documents that most of the times have been produced and disseminated by the artists themselves. Do not forget that critics and historians, immersed in culturally conservative societies and politically dislocated by fears and censorships institutionalized from authoritarianism, have preferred to still avoid the performance and other destabilizing proposals to focus on being functional to a legitimation system and promotion of consumption art in traditional media, or worse, to be disseminators of artistic experiences that reflect an instrumental subjection to the guidelines of the academy and the anti-democracy repressive discourses. This largely explains the lack of a considerable bibliography and of specialized studies on art action, which prevents to have a more comprehensive and rigorous assessment of the uniqueness and significance of this practice in the vast Latin American scene. Fortunately, in recent years, these absences seem to be reversed from a sustained interest of new critics and researchers who are dysfunctional with the system and are genuinely interested in the most controversial areas of contemporary art.
For many artists and researchers is undisputed that the art action in Latin American has characteristics that differentiate it the one practiced in other areas of the world. One of the first researchers in analyzing this question was Aracy Amaral, when in the frame of the First Latin American Colloquy of Non-Objectual Art, held at the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín in Colombia, in 1981, she dared to sustain that the Latin American non - objectualism was endowed with an identity non subsidiary of the guidelines of international art action. "It seems possible to affirm" –she said then- that the actions that distinguish, that singularize non-objectualism in Latin America, regarding the other produced in Europe and in the United States in the 60’s, are the settings in which it emerges, integrated to creativity, to the political implications in wide sense (...) When manifesting that political intentions they are revealed to themselves, committed with the here / now ... "(1)
A slight tour through of Latin American art action is sufficient to confirm Aracy Amaral’s words. The political concern, understood as commitment with the emerging problems of social reality, is the tendency that has strongly marked the practices of art action in the practices in the Latin America scene. Although extensive and diverse in its geography and in its people, almost all Latin America shares cultural elements and an eminently traumatic historical past. From the colonial experience up to the recent subjection to global hegemony powers, the Latin American history has been marked by recurring sufferings: political uncertainty, weak and vulnerable economies and marked social conflict. In almost all countries of the region military coups took place that broke democratic order and dictatorial and repressive models were installed. In this context of profound political effervescence, police control and violations of human rights, as was to be expected art action was assumed as resistance strategy and as a means of making visible the traumas of the "social body" condemned to invisibility and silence.
In the case of the performance it is necessary to consider that always responds to a specific context that determines it and that allows it to knot meanings. As the American researcher Diana Taylor suggests, the performance can operate as “a transmitter of the traumatic memory”, and also as its "re-staging"(2). The situation of Latin America forced by dictatorial regimes that reprocessed the social life starting form totalizing discourses, explains the emergence of a body that metaphors the trauma and becomes support of latencies and disobediences. It is a "political body", this is to say, a body that not only is an instrument of meanings, but rather operates in itself as reflect of certain place demarcations, associated to the flow of historical and social events. In the 70's, political fight and the emergence of a resistance art articulated a distinctive style of Latin American performance that with more or less effectiveness survives until the present time. Of these experiences, some already obsoletes in their discourse and in their methodology, it is rescued a conception of the body as territory of confrontations and negotiations, as plot to speculate what supposes an ideological positioning against the realities of the environment. In other words, the body is assumes as a social construction, not as a given form and developed scatteredly, but as the product of a dialectics between the "inside" and the "outside", between the individual body and the social body.
The "political body", as long as micro-territory in which is disputed the unanimous discourse of the repressive control and the disobedient and silent of the one that stands in contradiction, presupposes a "contextualized" action for the political contingencies, for the resistance gestures, for the discomfort and the social and cultural dislocation that require new operative ways of a system of symbolization and representation. Military dictatorships did not only caused a fracture at historical and institutional level and used force on the bodies by means of tortures and disappearances, but rather they also imposed a cut at symbolic level, implementing a disciplinarian and repressive discourse focused to model the society under immovable principles. Performance art, insert in this traumatic and traumatizing context, was posed with the urgency of a response, although always at interstitial level, to channel the overflowing and the unveiling of the repressed and silenced by authoritarianism. In the search of new representation forms that allowed to refer what happened deceiving the official surveillance exercised on the contents of art, were articulated significance ways not easily to decode, where the processual practices of the body was constituted in ways of an in the enormous simbolizing potentiality. Frecuently will be seen a body that works as "sacrificial zone of ritualization of pain in which the artist is self-inflicts a wound to solidarize himself with the historically mutilated" (4). In other occasions, the bodies unite in collective actions that are opposed to the dynamics of social demobilization and individualism, and that through interventions in public space, usually clandestine and fleeting, they try to subvert the militarist format imposed to daily life.
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