Defining the Aesthetic
Antecedents of the Installation Art in Chile: Political Contingency and Experimentality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rodrigo Bruna
The installation is a modality of contemporary art emerged in the sixties within the American minimalism. As a location practice, the installation inhabits / uses space in order to generate perceptive and cognitive experiences that reveal the role of the viewer as a transforming agent of space and its meaning. In the same way, the installation breaks with the autonomy of the work to become a social entity, open and participatory, which highlights its democratic condition. The first antecedents of the installation (art) in Chile appear in the late sixties in the light of political contingency and experimental searches. In this context, the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) assumes his mandate, highlighting the importance of art as a tool of emancipation and transformation. A tool that seeks to form active and critical subjects of their own reality. This paper is part of my doctoral research in progress whose theme is installation (art) in Chile, origin and development 1969-2014. From the analysis of two case studies, the aim is to investigate the antecedents of this practice based on the question: How did the historical, political and cultural context influence the emergence of the installation (art) in Chile? Through a methodology focused on critical analysis, written documents and images seek to describe, interpret and understand how political contingency and experimental practices influenced the emergence of the installation (art) in the country.
Wildness in the Cracks of Things: The Savage Vision of American Artist, David Hare and Its Surrealist Legacy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Lekatsas
David Hare (1917-1992) came to prominence as an artist during the 1940s, when André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, Salvador Dali, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, and other artists fleeing Nazi-occupied France arrived in New York. Hare, only twenty-four, became the managing editor of Breton’s journal, VVV (1942-1944). His leadership role in this movement as editor and artist in various genres is unique and deserves a reassessment. The historical record confirms Hare’s importance in shaping Surrealism in America and making it a source for the birth of Abstract Expressionism (by adapting its premises to an American landscape), yet his demotion by powerful art critic, Clement Greenberg, in his review of Hare’s major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1977, who proclaimed the artist’s use of myth as passé and codified pure abstraction in art, would lead to shrinking scholarship of a major artist and artworks lacking in ideas. Sartre had written of Hare’s work, “Each figure is hidden in its own shell…graceful and comical, mobile and congealed, realist and magical, indivisible and contradictory, showing simultaneously the mind which has become an object and the perpetual bypassing of the object by the mind” (N-Dimensional Sculpture, 1947). Hare’s sculpture, paintings, drawings and prints often use myth to examine the relationship between space and figure. My goal here is to examine this relationship, but also the politics of genre in an increasingly post-disciplinary age, which since Foucault and Derrida has come to question by whose authority the parameters limits are established. .
