INTRODUCTION / POLITICAL CONTEXT

I committed a Happening will tour through some actions and experiencies of a group of artists in
Argentina in the 1960s. This is a decade in Argentina with a strong desire for a revolution,
and people perceived these years as going through an important change in all aspects of life.
A very weak political system and eonomy, the crisis of the ruling value system and the
exhaustion of capitalism generated a deep mistrust towards democracy. The development of
this revolutionary ideas produced an intense process of social protests and political agitation,
together with the idea and use of violence as a legitimate option for a political change.
In Argentina, the use of the concept avant-garde referred to a group of artists that desired to
crate an avant-garde in terms of founding it rather that making a rupture with the existing
situation. In 1958, the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation and the Institute of the same name were
created in memory of engineer Torcuato Di Tella. The Institute was established with the mission
to "promote the study and research of high level, with regard to scientific, cultural and artistic
development; without losing sight of the Latin American context where Argentina is located."
Funded by the Foundation and supported by national and international bodies (like Ford and the
Rockefeller Foundation), the entity crystallized their activities through ten research centers
specialized in different themes, such as arts, economics, social sciences and urban planning.
Among the different centers at the Di Tella Institute, the Centro de Artes Visuales (Centre for
the Visual Arts) (known as La Manzana Loca o El Moderno) was an entity that changed the
perception of artistic phenomena in Argentina. The director, Jorge Romero Brest, was
responsible for the experimental center that, over time, became synonymous with avant-garde
and controversial thinking. Roberto Villanueva was the director of the Centro de
Experimentacin Audiovisual (Centre for Audiovisual Experimentation), in which the
image of video was included for the first time in theatre. The Institute contributed to the
formation of several generations of artists, professionals and academics. From all the different
experiences, the happenings had the most attention in terms of experimental participatory
actions. A happening says Argentine artist Roberto Jocobys, was an action that lack
meditation, had a direct communication with objects and persons, and a short distance between
the viewer and the viewed, among other characteristics.
1) SUCESO PLSTICO (Plstic Event) MARTA MINUJN July 25, 1965
Marta Minujns happening was in Montevideo and revealed her own interest in audience
aggression. Held in a working class neighbourhood, the event involved participants being put
together into the Pearol futbol stadium at 3 in the afternoon, listening to Bach's Mass in B
minor when they were encircled by motorbikes blaring sirens. Women and children were lifted
by body builders, men were kissed by female singers, fifteen fat ladies rolled around on the
floor, twenty embracing couples were fastened together with tape. A helicopter appeared
overhead and dropped flour, lettuce and 500 live chickens on top of the audience, moving up
and down so that wind from the propeller sent the hens and lettuce leaves flying around.
Throughout this short by intense event, the audience could not escape the stadium, which was

closed. And after eight minutes, minujin called for an end. This happening provides an important
precedent for the development of a type of performance in which participants were centred as
object and material of work.
2) Anti-Happening, The First Word of Media Art, Happing for a Dead Boar or Total Participation,
Roberto Jacoby, Raul Escari and Eduardo Costa, 1966.
Oscar Masotta (1930-1979), was a theorist, happenist and participant of the local experimental
scene, best known for introducing Lacanian psychoanalysis into Argentina. He was also
interested in ideas of discontinuity and dematerialization, which referred not to the ephimeral
aspect of the work but to the circulation of art in the mass media. Masottas studied philosophy
at the University of Buenos Aires, he engaged with Marxism and Existentialism. In the 1960s he
turned to structural linguistics and visual art, and his lectura Pop art and Semantics in 1965
is one of the earliest attempts to use linguistic analysis in the interpretation of works of arts.
Masotta led a Reading group where structural linguistics and communications theory was
applied to works of arts. From that Reading group, was created El Grupo de las Artes de los
Medios Masivos (Group of Mass Media Art), whose best known production was an antihappening in July 1966 known as Primera Obra de Arte de los Medios (The First Work of
Media Art), Happening para un jabal difunto (Happening for a dead boar) or Participacin total
(Total participation). Authored by Roberto Jacoby, Raul Escari and Eduardo Costa with nine
other artists (including Marta MInujn and Masotta).
The artists issued a press relase announcing the Happening, together with photographs of the
event, looking like a fun party. In several newspapers and magazines appeared reports of this
Happening. But in fact, the happening never actually took place: it was only photographs staged
for media dissemination. This happening existed purely as information, a dematerialised
circulation of facts. It blurred the lines between participants and viewers, since there was no
original event to have attended in the first place. The media itself became the mdium of the
work and its primary content. The idea was to undermine Happenings insistence on immediacy
and presence, to challenge their exaggerated media status and the idea that the people who
attend these events expect to be entertained.
The actions produced in Argentina during this decade, many of them influenced by Masotta,
were more cerebral, self-reflexive and less visually oriented, seeming to demand that viewers
think and analyze.
1966 COUP DTAT - THE NIGHT OF THE LONG BATONS
In 1966 the coup dtat led by General Ongana overthrew elected president Arturo Illia on June
29th, and started the military government known as the Revolucin Argentina. Ongana
declared a state of siege, abolished all social manifestations and political parties (peronism,
radicalism, communism), and introduced a state terrorism. This dictatorship imposed new forms
of censorship and oppression to its citizens. Ongana persecuted universities as they were

considered the nests of communism and subversin, applying a strict censorship the contents of
the programs.
The Argentine public universities were by then autonomous, and the political power was divided
in a tripartite government of students, professors and graduates. The night of the long batons
refers to the expulsin of five faculties of the University of Buenos Aires occupied by students
and graduates, as opposed to the decisin of the military government to intervene these
universities. The name refers to the long batons used by the police to hit students, professors
and graduates while taking them out of the buildings on July 29, 1966. Many people were
detained, and laboratories and libraries completely destroyed. In the following months, 1.300
professors resigned, hundreds of professors were fired or abandoned the country.
2) To Induce the Spirit of the Image (Para Inducir el Espritu de la Imagen) 1966
In November Masotta produced his first happening. The work is known for its aggressive
attitude towards participants. 20 elderly lower-middle class men and women were paid to stand
in a storage room, in front of an audience, and to be subjected to fire-extinguishers, a high
pitched sound and blinding white light. At the beginning Masotta lectured the audience about
control. In this introduction Masotta also made reference to the economic circuit of his work,
reminding the audience that they had each paid 200 pesos to watch the event, while the
participants had been paid 600 pesos each to perform.
A year after Masotta mentioned the post mortem I commited a Happening, which brought up
the question of guilt. The guilt implied in the sentence is an ironic response towards the Marxist
intellectual Gregorio Klimovsky, whose reaction to the Happening was typical from the dominant
leftist responses to art at that time, and happenings in particular: describing them as frivolous
waste of resources, instead of addressing real problems like hunger. For Masotta this
experiment was made to engage more directly with the contradictions of the existing social and
political context. The effect he wanted was a sparse, naked, hard experience, in direct contact to
the frivolous media image of the Happenings. This was a social act of manipulation which in
real society happens everyday (Masotta).
When asked what he meant, Masotta answered: an act of social sadism made explicit. With this
happening and its post-mortem, Masotta seems to establish a different ethical framework for the
happenings, one whose is informed more by the anti-humanism of Lacanian ethics and refers to
Sade, encouraging everyone not to compromise their unconscious desire in favor of social and
familial demands. Masottas work consolidate a narrative of work in Argentina that adopts a
particular aggressive strategy of reification, frequently played out in relation to class. The
combined pressures of military dictatorship and an imported European intellectual heritage gave
rise to a singular mode of participatory art, which transformed the celebratory immediacy of the
Happenings into an intellectual framework of mediated constraint, manipulation and negation.
(Claire Bishop).

3) Encierro, Graciela Carnevale. Ciclo de Arte Experimental by Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia.

Rosario 1968
The coercive approach to participation was very clear in the Ciclo de Arte Experimental
organized by Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia in the city of Rosario between May and October,
1968. The cycle took the form of a series of ten actions, one every fifteen days, many of which
appropriated social forms, behaviors and relations. Most of these events had to do with
withdrawing from institutional spaces, finding new audiences, and merging art with life by
working with audiences as the material of artistic action. The most striking of these events,
planned to take place at the end of the Cycle, on October the 7th, was created by Graciela
Carnevale, whose work has received a lot of attention and was part of Documenta 12 in 2007.
Graciela describes: the work consist in first preparing a totally empty room, with totally empty
walls, In this room the participating audience, which has come together by chance for the
opening, has been locked in. I have taken prisoners. The point is to allow people to enter and to
prevent them from leaving. There is no possibility of escape, in fact the spectators have no
choice; they are obliged, violently to participate. Their positive or negative reaction is always a
form of participation. The end of the work, as unpredictable for the viewer as it is for me, is
nevertheless intentioned: will the spectator tolerate the situation passively? Will an unexpected
event rescue him from being locked in? Or will he proceed violently to break the glass?
After an hour, the visitors trapped inside the gallery removed the posters that had been placed
on the windows to prevent communication with those outside. Contrary to Carnevales hope, no
one inside the gallery took action. Eventually it was a person on the street who smashed one of
the windows. The plice arrived and closed down the event and with it the rest of the Cycle.
Carnevales event is both metaphorical and phenomenological: to make the audience aware of,
and to feel in their own bodies, the violence they were living in.
4) Invisible Theatre (1971-76)
Theatre of the Oppressed is a book that Brazilian director Augusto Boal wrote while his exile in
Argentina. It is an explicit reference to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and brings
innovative strategies for public theatre in South America. Boal reconfigured the audience/actor
relationship in new forms of participatory performance for raising consciousness and
empowering the working class. He considered that spectators should be eliminated and re
conceptualised as spect-actors.
Invisible Theatre was developed in Buenos Aires but also done in Lima as a participatory action
designed to avoid detention by police. Spectators would see a show without seeing a show. In a
restaurant a number of actors are seated at different tables; the protagonists loudly announces
that he wants to eat a la carte, since the rest of the food available is too bad. The waiter tells
him it will cost 70 soles, which the actor say is no problem. At the end of the meal he receives
the bill and announces that he's unable to pay for it. The actor offers to pay with his own labour
power, he asks the waiter how much he would get paid for taking out the rubbish. The waiter

avoids answering, but a second actor, at another table, says that he knows that a friend earns 7
soles per hour as a rubbish collector. Then the main actor says he perhaps could do the
gardening..and he asks how much does a gardener earns per hour..at that time the restaurant
becomes a public frum. Eventually one of the actors starts collecting money to pay the bill and
managed to raise 100 soles. Boal connected the oppression to the economics of class
inequality. He wanted to train the public to be more conscious of class difference. He believed
that if public is able to rehearse actions for social and political change, public is also able to
execute them in reality.
CONCLUSION
Participatory actions in Argentina is a response to a very harsh context, where everything in
society was hidden, it was very difficult to find transparency or immediacy within the political,
social and economical system. This led to bring art and life closer, by using people as artistic
material, raising a consciousness as a weapon against an even greater brutality (the
dictatorship). These works set and important precedent for the uses of participation while also
questions the assumption that participation is synonymous for democracy. Also, these
experiences were made as opposition to the United States support to these dictatorships. For
these artists a work of art should have a similar effect to a political action, if the work has to
make an effective impact on the recipients consciousness it is essential to deal with the material
in a shocking, even violent way (Len Ferrari).
Under this political situation, the Di Tella Institute was closed by General Ongana in 1970. By
the end of the decade, and in the first years of the 70s, to be considered an avant-garde artist
was no longer a valuable position, which in many cases artists abandoned art for a commitment
to politicized organizations and/or to the resignment to their condition of intellectuals. Art or any
other intellectual desire had to wait until the day after the revolution.