Edgardo Antonio Vigo`s Proyectos a Realizar

Transcripción

Essay
Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s
Proyectos a Realizar
Vanessa Davidson
I
n the catalogue accompanying a 1970 exhibition entitled From
Figuration to Systems Art, Argentine critic and curator Jorge
Glusberg related the curious circumstances of his acquaintance with a little-known artist from La Plata, Argentina,
whose proyectos a realizar, or projects to be realized, were on
display. “My personal relationship with Edgardo [Antonio] Vigo is
emblematic,” he remarked, “for it began not by direct contact between
a man from Buenos Aires and another living in La Plata, some 60
kilometers away, but rather by means of the comments made to me
in a small town in Czechoslovakia—Trebic—by the painter Ladislav
Novak. It was he who spoke to me for the first time of this artist,
who I thus discovered, only two years ago, upon returning to Buenos
Aires.”1
As director of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, or CAYC,
the focal point of esthetic experimentation in Argentina during the
1970s, Glusberg cultivated contacts with cutting-edge artists and
curators abroad and served as local ringleader and talent scout. It
may therefore seem surprising that he was unfamiliar with Vigo’s
work, which, as he asserts in the same text, perfectly embodies the
systems of art he defines as “a language with a dual interest in
investigation and communication, and which at the same time commands the spectator’s active participation.”2 Vigo’s 1969 Obras (in)
completas, or (In)Complete Works, included in Glusberg’s exhibition,
are key examples of the text-based arte de participación he developed
to challenge traditional definitions of art, and to question the nature
of the creative process (Fig. 1). Sent through the mail to artists and
friends near and far away, this work consists of four printed labels
meant to be affixed to any objects the recipients deemed worthy of
art status. The accompanying instructions specify that, “in line with
the theory of participation art, a certain percentage of the creation is
transferred to wherever you desire to place them”: a kind of doit-yourself kit for creating ready-mades, the work transforms former
spectators into collaborators in processes of Duchampian designation.3 Affixing a set of these labels to earthenware bottles of Bols
Gin—marketed as “the traditional drink of Argentine gauchos”—
Vigo’s own rendition evokes Duchamp’s iconic bottle rack while also
inscribing the project within Argentine popular culture. References
to literary packaging (such as “Volumes 1 through 4”) complete the
allusion to recipients as “co-authors,” exposing art as a fiction in
which viewers are invited to play active roles.
Textual operations are at the heart of Vigo’s practice. Recognized
as the founder of mail art in Argentina, he is best known for vivid,
graphic works on paper. However, his diverse conceptual activities
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Davidson / Edgardo Antonio Vigo’s Proyectos a Realizar
Fig. 1
Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Obras (in)completas, 1969.
Reproduced with permission from the Fundación de Artes Visuales/Centro de Arte
Experimental Vigo, La Plata, Argentina.
are too often overlooked. This paper explores Vigo’s projects to be
realized as paradigms of a participatory conceptual art with roots in
poetry and play, and his theories as missing links in the current
understandings of conceptualism in South America and its connection to poetic experimentation.
Glusberg’s discovery of Vigo’s work through an Eastern European painter in 1968 attests to the artist’s paradoxical status as a
marginal figure in his homeland and as a prominent member of
the international mail art community that began to flourish in the
mid-1960s. Though such practices made him virtually invisible to
local commentators, they also enabled him to sidestep institutional
mechanisms of promotion and diffusion to participate directly in
international networks of collaboration and exchange. Frustrated
that few artists within Argentina shared his enthusiasm for “an
expansive art that reels you in by playful means, that facilitates
the active participation of spectators via the absurd [. . .] No longer contemplation but rather activity,” he sought inspiration and
encouragement elsewhere.4 Beginning in 1966 and continuing
throughout his career, Vigo exchanged ideas, artworks, and poems
with other artists via post, collaborating on textual exhibitions and
long-distance conceptual art projects with colleagues he never met
from Brazil to New York, Germany to Japan, and even, as we have
seen, within the Eastern bloc. To disseminate his and his collaborators’ works and writings, during the 1960s and 1970s he founded a
series of magazines imbued with an irreverence that characterizes
his larger body of work, and organized ground-breaking exhibitions
of such works in Buenos Aires and La Plata.5
One such magazine, Diagonal Cero (1962–1968), was especially
important in disseminating Vigo’s poetic experimentation and
connecting him to like-minded poets at home and abroad. The La
Plata artists and poets who congregated around the magazine
became known as the Movimiento Diagonal Cero, whose members
included Luis Pazos, Jorge de Luján Gutiérrez y Omar Gancedo, who
would later be replaced by Carlos Ginzburg. Taking cues from the
Brazilian concrete poets of the Noigandres group, these young
poets sought to overhaul outdated poetic tropes by experimenting with typography and word placement, also publishing articles
on the most advanced art and poetry of the day.6 Even the format
of their magazine was revolutionary: unbound sheets contained
in sheaths enabled readers to peruse the pages in the order they
wished. Special sections featured poetry and woodcuts by other
Latin American artists, consolidating the magazine’s reputation as
international in scope, and expanding Vigo’s list of mail art contacts.7
Nor was Vigo alone in experimenting with conceptual art in
Argentina in the late 1960s, though he was the sole artist to arrive
at conceptualism via poetry. Artists grouped around Buenos Aires’
Di Tella Institute, directed by Jorge Romero Brest, began such experimentation as early as 1966. For example, in 1966 Roberto Jacoby,
Raúl Escarri, and Eduardo Costa developed a theory of arte de los
medios, or mass media art, which would constitute “the work of art
inside mass media itself.”8 Their most famous work, Happening por
un jabalí difunto, or Happening for a Dead Boar, was a fictitious
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account of a happening, news of which was published in several
major newspapers before being exposed as a charade.
Other early forays into conceptual art dealt more with social
and political issues, blurring the boundaries between art, life, and
politics. For instance, for his La familia obrera, or The Proletarian
Family, Oscar Bony paid a laborer and his family (father, mother, and
son) to sit on a plinth for the duration of the Di Tella’s Experiencias
’68 exhibition, paying them double their daily wages. For Tucumán
arde, or Tucumán is Burning, also from 1968, a group of artists from
Buenos Aires and Rosario collaborated with union members of the
Confederación General de Trabajadores de los Argentinos (CGT,
General Workers Confederation of the Argentines) to create a
“circuit of counter-information” that would expose the government’s
touting of Tucumán as the “garden of the republic” as a fiction. One
of the country’s most impoverished provinces, the team documented the misery in Tucumán and displayed their findings in
CGT union headquarters, first in Rosario, then in Buenos Aires,
where it was shut down by police after two days.9 Although many
members of the Tucumán Arde collective ceased creating art after
this experience, considering art ineffectual for changing society,
New York critic Lucy Lippard returned from Argentina after a 1968
trip “belatedly radicalized,” calling these artists’ “mixture of
conceptual and political ideas” a “revelation.”10
Vigo never participated in the Di Tella’s 1960s Experiencias
exhibitions, nor was his art politically radical during the 1960s. He
did, however, sporadically participate in CAYC exhibitions in the
1970s, always at Glusberg’s invitation. As we have seen, he contributed works to the From Figuration to Systems Art exhibition, which
traveled extensively in various versions throughout Argentina and
Europe in 1970–74. He also contributed to Escultura, Ruido, y Follaje,
or Sculpture, Noise, and Foliage, in 1970, to Arte en Cambio, or
Changing Art, and to Arte en Cambio II in 1973. The pieces Vigo
contributed to these exhibitions are not well documented,
but reviews of the Systems Art exhibition suggest that they included
Vigo’s conceptual works, objects, and woodblock prints, the latter
harkening back to his first forays into art in the 1950s.11
Vigo studied at La Plata’s School of Fine Arts between 1950 and
1952, setting off for Paris in 1953, where he met Venezuelan artist
Jesús Rafael Soto by chance in a bar. He was subsequently exposed
to the kinetic experiments of the Denise René Gallery circle, but
returned to Argentina in 1954, prior to the landmark Le Mouvement
exhibition of 1955.12 Back in La Plata, he exhibited abstract structures made of painted wooden slats connected by metal bands, early
experiments with his ideal of “a touchable art” meant to be freely
manipulated by the public.13 Hanging from the ceiling and freestanding on the floor, these works’ irregular geometries and play
with positive and negative space reflect the influence of Argentine
Madí sculpture of the mid to late 1940s, such as Guyla Kosice’s
1948 Mobile Articulated Sculpture.14 However, it is doubtful that any
of Guyla Kosice’s sleek, interactive works suffered the fate of Vigo’s
mobiles during their first exhibition: instead of approaching them as
vehicles for exploring the dynamism of forms in space, as the artist
intended, the audience destroyed them.
Needless to say, the exhibition provoked what Vigo remembers as
a “small scandal” in the insular community of La Plata, and soured the
artist’s attitude toward public displays of his work for years to come.
Unsettled, yet undaunted, he withdrew to his studio to reconsider
fundamental issues of artistic communication and audience engagement, mining Dadaist tactics for shattering the “solemn-religious
character of the ‘work of art’” to embrace “lo lúdico,” or “playfulness,”
as an esthetic device. In Vigo’s view, playfulness acts as “a point of
contact among diverse approaches to art, since it has been proven
that this is the only possible way for society to regain its interest and
participation in the phenomenon of art.”15 Unfortunately, La Plata
residents were as unimpressed with his geometric sculptures as they
were uninterested in the “useless machines” he created as satirical
commentary on the Argentines’ faith that industry and technology
were keys to progress during the desarrollista period. For example,
drawing obvious inspiration from Francis Picabia’s mechanical
drawings and collages and Jean Tinguely’s meta-mechanical devices,
Vigo’s 1957 dysfunctional Cargador eléctrico, or Electric Charger,
comes complete with “technical specifications and an instruction
manual” for solving most any problem: it can be used “for breasts, for
Chinese shadows, to pick yourself up, to charge electricity, to evade
sexual impulses.”16
Although he would continue to create such deliberately provocative pieces throughout his career, notably his 1963 Palanganómetro mecedor para criticos de arte (que no se mece), translatable as
a Rocking Show-off Machine for Art Critics (that does not rock), in
the early 1960s Vigo turned his attention to burgeoning epistolary
friendships with artists and poets abroad. Involved in comparable
experiments in contexts more propitious for their development,
these colleagues shared Vigo’s interests in reformulating poetic and
plastic languages into new, inter-media forms. Along with personal
letters with news of life in La Plata, in these early mailings Vigo sent
poems, magazines, and constructions he called relativuzgirs, in which
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he translated his foiled pursuit of touchable, transformable art forms
into works on paper. His “mathematical poems” are incomprehensible combinations of letters, numbers, and shapes that undermine
numbers’ rational function and are meant to restore math’s “poetic
constant and its quotient of mystery and wonder.”17
Projects such as his Revista irritante, or Irritating Magazine, of
1958, also frustrate expectations of practical utility. Vigo envisioned
that the recipient would encounter a large, manila envelope in her
mailbox and follow a crudely-drawn arrow to a smaller envelope
on top, unfolding a note that advises her to “neither look for a solution, nor in its interior: all is relative.” Curiosity piqued, she turns
the envelope over and peeks inside, only to find its contents stuck
tightly together with sealing wax, making it impossible to extract
the work without simultaneously destroying it. Perhaps intended
as a parody of the inaccessible, incomprehensible objet d’art, this
work—emphatically hecho a mano with banal materials and non-art
techniques—entraps unsuspecting participants in a game of artistic discovery that is at once intellectual and manual, and privileges
process over product.
Vigo takes this emphasis on viewers’ active role in the literal and
metaphorical unfolding of artwork a step further in his relativuzgirs
of 1957–58 (Fig. 2). Identified as “clandestine visual magazines,” and
produced in “collaboration” with two artists Vigo invented, Otto Von
Mascht and Igor Orit, the works’ cryptic title is code for Vigo’s
interest in art as experience that takes place in real space and time.18
According to the artist, “relativuzgir” is “a marriage between relativity,
Einstein’s philosophical-mathematical base, electricity as an active
element, and the property of rotation, that is to say the escape from
the REPRESENTATION of movement to movement itself.”19 Made
of coarse paper with hand-punched perforations, these unassuming works translate concrete art’s vocabulary of colored planes from
two dimensions into actual space, enabling those who manipulate
them to simulate the construction of abstract paintings and sculptures. Examined by itself, each sheet is a monochrome through
which fragments of the world can be glimpsed; superimposition
engenders variable patterns of color and form, as layered planes are
shuffled and the composition reconfigured. Like Argentine Madí
artist Juan Melé’s irregular frame paintings deconstructed into so
many multi-colored puzzle pieces, or Soto’s semi-transparent planes
detached from their supports for viewers to rearrange at will, these
works break geometric abstraction into its constituent parts and
invite audiences to usurp the role of artist in putting them back
together. Though Vigo did not refer to them as such, these too are
Fig. 2
Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Relativuzgir, 1957.
“projects to be realized,” “clandestine” manuals for making the most
progressive art of the moment in one’s own living room.
Vigo undoubtedly drew from international manifestations of
geometric art in creating these works, but his relativuzgirs’ most
compelling formal and ideological connections are with Brazilian
neo-concrete art and poetry, specifically with Lygia Pape’s Book of
Creation of 1959 and Wlademir Dias-Pino’s process poems of the
mid-1960s (Fig. 3). As Brazilian poet and theorist Ferreira Gullar
asserted in his 1959 “Theory of the Non-Object,” the neo-concretists aimed to “synthesize both sensory and mental experiences”
in creations that served as “vehicles for the imagination.” Participants
were “asked to use,” rather than contemplate, such works, which
“exist[ed] only as potential, waiting for a human gesture to realize
[them].”20 This is an apt description of Vigo’s interactive works, begun
a few years earlier; Pape’s Book is also paradigmatic in this regard.
Accompanied by titles that tell the story of the world’s creation—
verbal clues she refused to document in writing, so that each
rendition would necessarily diverge from the last—it posits poetry
and abstract form as springboards for viewers’ personal constructions
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Fig. 3
Wlademir Dias-Pino, Process Poem, mid-1960s.
of a universal narrative. Vigo’s relativuzgirs lack this lyrical dimension,
as do Dias-Pino’s visual “poems,” but their formal congruencies are
remarkable. Dependent on viewer involvement to transform from
two-dimensional sheets of paper into three-dimensional works of
art, these artists’ hand-made multiples recast rigid geometries into
flexible systems that exist in a latent state of becoming. Their open
structures allow for countless variations, while their collapsible
formats enable participants to interact with them far from the
confines of the museum. Much as Vigo’s work gains further dimensions of time and space as it travels through the mail, Pape’s
photographs of the Book in everyday settings around Rio de Janeiro
underscore the integration of art into the realm of life, and vice versa,
as a crucial aspect of her project.
All three works make intellectual operations physical, as participants are invited to turn works over in their hands as well as their
minds. Yet Dias-Pino’s constructions offer an additional dimension:
are they to be considered poems without words or interactive art?
Though Dias-Pino characterized them as “process poems,” in which
“what is important is the project and its visualization: [and] the word
is dispensable,” for Vigo, they were both.21 These hybrid works also
represent a theoretical point of departure for a new paradigm of
activity Vigo elaborated in a 1969 treatise entitled “De la poesía/
proceso a la poesía para y/o a realizar,” roughly translatable as “From
Process/Poetry to Poetry to be and/or Realized.”22
Written on the occasion of a ground-breaking exhibition he
organized at the Di Tella Institute in 1969, the Expo/Internacional de
la Novísima Poesía, this document lays the foundations for a theory
of conceptual art based on operations inaugurated in poetry rather
than art, a connection heretofore unexplored in the Argentine
context.23 A didactic text, it takes the form of an “encyclopedic
history” that charts the increasing emphasis on reader participation
in poetic praxis over the course of the 1960s on an international scale.
This evolution is defined in terms of a progression from concretism,
to process poetry (also called “poems to be constructed”) to a category Vigo terms “poems to be and/or realized.” Using specific works
included in the Novísima Poesía exhibition as examples, Vigo traces
the transformation of poetry from a mental exercise, typified by the
intellectual gymnastics required by concrete poets’ verbivocovisual
play, to a physical activity, exemplified by the three-dimensional,
transformable process poems created by Dias-Pino, among others, to
works that consist only of minimal “clues” or suggestions for creative
action that can take place outside the realm of poetry altogether.24
This last category of “poetry to be and/or realized” leads the way
to a synthetic practice that forms the basis of Vigo’s conceptualism:
“The possibility of art is no longer only in the participation of the
observer, but rather in her constructive-ACTIVATION in an ART TO
BE REALIZED that has burned down divisions between inherited
genres and proceeds toward a goal of total integration.”25 In this
new paradigm, artists and poets no longer merely present audiences
with interactive works. They become “programmers of projects” who
spur participants to “move from the category of consumer to that of
creator.” The projects themselves could take many forms, so long as
they are “most modifiable, allowed for changes, replacements, and
additions, either of materials or of formal structures that foster play,”
and engender “the truly active (and unconditional) participation of
the ‘constructor.’”26
Though all of Vigo’s projects to be realized are designed as
catalysts for action, they fall into two categories: several constitute
proposals for creating art objects, while the majority are intended
to generate experiences. In many cases, the use of simple materials
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and basic techniques belies complex undercurrents of meaning. If at
first glance some projects resemble children’s games, closer reading
often reveals subtle political messages. For instance, Vigo’s Historieta
para armar, or Comic Strip to be Constructed, of 1971 and Manual e
instrucciones para realizar una “obra de arte” (ocidental y cristiana), or
Manual and Instructions for the Construction of a (Western and Christian) “Work of Art,” of 1969 offer opportunities to create artworks at
opposite ends of the commercial spectrum, from popular culture
to fine art. Instructions for the Comic Strip are a jovial enjoinder
to participants to seize their paintbrushes: “Sharpen your wit and
proceed. We are providing you with MINIMAL CLUES. Color it, give
it rhythm, fill in the bubbles and animate the characters. The result
(which depends on you) could be: a story of love, of war, of gangsters,
of politics (are you up for it?) Then keep it, show it off, destroy it,
and come get another one and do it again or . . . we propose that you
bring it to be exhibited in our window to share your results.”27 Since
the only characters provided for animation are cavemen gathered
around a fire, Vigo’s proposed cartoon melodramas must play out
in participants’ imaginations—or be created from scratch. Beneath
these huddled figures lies an index of the artist’s subtle subversions.
Though the declaration “no tengo obras,” “I have no works,” might
denote the artist’s transfer of creative responsibility to the recipient,
it sounds a lot like “no tengo armas,” “I am unarmed,” a loaded statement in the tense, repressive environment of early 1970s Argentina.
Manual and Instructions for the Construction of a (Western and
Christian) “Work of Art” has an even more pronounced political bite.
Vigo here mocks conservative ideals of high art: as in the Irritating
Magazine project, recipients can peek through the hole provided
in the envelope, but the secrets to creating a lofty “Work of Art”
are locked securely inside. The work’s title, a familiar reference
to General Juan Carlos Onganía’s justification of the 1966 military
coup (and ensuing dictatorship) as morally righteous, makes the
message contained in the cartoon bubble near the top all the more
ominous: “Never fear,” it reads, “punishment will be for he who
impedes the subjugating empire of esthetic acts. They will receive
the . . .”28
Vigo’s work would become more overtly political as the military
government cracked down on militants in the years preceding the
1976 military coup. Although his ideal of provoking participation is
well suited to activism, the majority of his projects to be realized
lacked this political charge before that date. Vigo’s Señalamientos,
or Signaling series, begun in 1968, is instead intended to awaken
audiences’ appreciation of everyday objects and activities. Delivered
to participants via mail or handed out at random on the street, these
works function as instruction cards for seeing life as art and art as
life. Some propose purposeless action in determined locales, such
as the Manojo de semáforos, or Cluster of Traffic Lights, Signaling
event, which consisted of “an esthetic and creative analysis of the
traffic light located at the intersection of 1st and 60th avenues in
La Plata,” on October 25, 1968, at 8:00 pm.29 Spectators were
intended simply to contemplate this unassuming element of urban
architecture, one of the many they would pass in their daily
perambulations around the city, and as such be awakened to the
structural beauty of mundane objects. So as not to interfere with
others’ realization of this “gratuitous act of esthetic investigation,”
Vigo himself did not attend, though he conserved a photograph
of the object in question in his archives.30
He was, however, present for the realization of the Paseo visual
por la Plaza Rubén Darío, or Visual Stroll Through the Plaza Rubén
Darío, in 1970, his fifth Signaling event, staged as part of the CAYC’s
Escultura, Ruido, y Follaje exhibition. This piece simply proposed
that participants select and mark with chalk a small area in a public
park and make a 360 degree turn within it: “register within yourself
what you have seen, and make your conclusions: in the end, you will
have realized a VISUAL STROLL THROUGH THE PLAZA RUBÉN
DARÍO.”31 Suggested variations—enacting the turn standing on
tip-toe, crouching, or, impossibly, stretched out flat on the ground—
engender different perspectives. Regardless of their chosen orientation, all participants are entitled to a badge emblazoned with a red
“V,” the sign or brand of Vigo, a certification of artistic legitimacy
that finds parallels in Yves Klein’s “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial
Sensibility,” Piero Manzoni’s “art certificates,” and fellow Argentine
Alberto Greco’s own “dedo vivo” or “living finger” art, begun only a
few years earlier. On the other hand, in their celebration of everyday
life as raw material for esthetic experience, as well as their cultivation
of chance and indeterminacy as crucial components, such signalings
are akin to John Cage’s landmark 4´33˝ or “silent piece” of 1952 and to
the Fluxus “event scores” born of Cagean influence during the early
1960s, as discussed below.
Vigo’s 1973 Acciones interconectadas por sequencias, or Actions
Interconnected by Means of Sequences, also encapsulate his esthetic
of participation and play. The first proposes that participants “turn
around. Look for points of reference at [sic] your choice. Memorize
all seen during the 360 degrees of the vision. Statically, repeat the
circle by ‘VISUALIZATION-MEMORY.’ To rub out the images, turn
around in the opposite sense.”32 Unlike the Visual Stroll Through the
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Plaza Rubén Darío, this proposal enables the participant to execute
the suggested action whenever and wherever she wishes. The same
can be said of the three remaining actions: the second, Modification
by Soaking, calls for participants to catch the atmosphere in their
hands and “soak” what they have captured; the third, Come and Go,
invites recipients to cross the street and take a visual “inventory of
things”; and the fourth involves hitch-hiking and assessing the time
it takes to move from one place to another and back again. These
ephemeral actions are intended to make participants aware of their
surroundings by the simplest means, urging them to contemplate
the urban fabric they traverse daily in a new light. Once again, life
itself is the subject of Vigo’s art, as participants become aware of
everyday elements they take for granted.
Vigo’s Signaling works reflect an emphasis on what he calls
“PRESENTATION rather than REPRESENTATION,” processes
of making aware rather than making anew.33 A quasi-mathematical
equation included in the Cluster of Traffic Lights event announcement encapsulates this further shift towards dematerialization: “no
poetic image, plus no plastic image,” equals “yes real image.” Yet,
even as the projects to be realized increasingly privilege action over
objects, Vigo continues to rely on text as carriers of meaning and
tangible points of contact with participants.
For instance, in his (In)conferencia (de la serie Actos a Realizar N.
0001/69), or (Un)Lecture (From the Acts to be Realized Series N. 0001/69),
Vigo invites participants not to give spontaneous discourses. The
invitation reads: “The street invites you to your own (un)lecture
to be given in the place, date, and time to be designated.” The
instructions are spelled out clearly: “Decide one day to go to a
place with the current invitation in hand and proceed to mumble,
sing, whistle, move or sway your body, etc. Do not give your own
lecture. For reasons of solidarity, please attend other (un)lectures.”34
This piece, sent complete with a “Ticket-Invitation” to give to
others, highlight’s Vigo’s emphasis on the absurd as a valid
conceptual strategy.
Though many parallels exist, especially with fellow Argentine
Alberto Greco’s “living finger” art of the 1960s, Vigo’s conceptualism was quite unlike contemporaneous works by artists from
Europe and the United States. In Greco’s works, performed in cities
throughout Europe and in Buenos Aires, he would spontaneously
sign people and objects or encircle them with chalk, thereby turning
them into “living works of art.”35 Some of his most enduring images
are photographs of ordinary people (a peasant riding a donkey, a
washwoman) holding up signs proclaiming “This is a Work of Art by
Alberto Greco,” or simply “Greco.” These works in turn evoke Piero
Manzoni’s “art certificates,” mentioned above, handed out to people
he signed as works of art in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Manzoni
also created a “magic base,” upon which people could stand to
become “living sculptures.”36
In effect, in his notes for a project he called “PROSPECTIVA
DEL PASADO,” or “PROSPECT FROM THE PAST,” Vigo writes:
“MARCEL DUCHAMP, KURT SCHWITTERS, MACEDONIO
FERNANDEZ, XUL SOLAR, ALBERTO GRECO, JOSEPH
BEUYS would be my 6 names. They are not exclusive or unique,
they are simply mine.”37 Macedonio Fernández was a modernist
writer and poet (and Jorge Luis Borges’s mentor) who favored puns
and had a penchant for the absurd. Xul Solar was a modernist
artist and self-styled mystic celebrated by the early 1920s Martin
Fierro avant-garde for his brilliant watercolors, strongly influenced
by Paul Klee, who also proposed to develop a universal language
he called “panlengua.” Duchamp’s influence is clearly seen in
Vigo’s varied works, and the Beuysian notion of “social sculpture,”
in which “everyone is an artist,” resounds throughout his projects
to be realized.
Vigo collected a sizable personal library,38 including monographs
on Beuys and Duchamp, as well as Gregory Battcock’s seminal
1966 New Art: A Critical Anthology (Spanish translation 1969),
so he certainly knew something of international manifestations of
conceptual art.39 In addition, among his papers is a transcription
in Spanish of Henry Flynt’s prescient 1963 essay “Concept Art,”
in Jackson Mac Low and George Maciunas’ An Anthology,40 which
would have provided him a window onto Fluxus activities.41 And
he surely would not have missed exhibitions on conceptual art held
at the CAYC, such as Lucy Lippard’s 1970 2,972,453, Art as Idea in
England, organized by Charles Harrison of Art & Language in 1971,
Art as Idea (USA), staged by Joseph Kosuth also in 1971, and Body
Works, presented by Dennis Oppenheim the same year.42 Though
Vigo began his own conceptual activities in 1968, these exhibitions
must have given him much food for thought.
As far from Joseph Kosuth’s tautological conceptualist practice
as it is from Hans Haacke’s political works or the UK Art &
Language’s ontological approach, Vigo’s conceptualism shares
the most common ground with Lawrence Weiner’s early work.
For instance, Weiner’s “Statement of Intent” of 1968 redefines
the traditional relationship between artist, audience, and objects
by positing the “receiver” as an active participant in the work’s
“condition”:
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1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent
with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with
the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.43
Although the word “receiver” implies a passive stance, the viewer/
reader is here given an active role in determining the condition—
linguistic or physical—and therefore the appearance of the artwork,
as in Vigo. “Receiver” also emphasizes the works’ status as communiqués, verbal ideas delivered as messages with the potential for
realization as three-dimensional objects, as, for example, in Vigo’s
Comic Strip, sent through the mail to multiple recipients. By shifting
responsibility for the decision to execute his verbal “sculptures” to
the reader/receiver instead of realizing the pieces himself, Weiner
remains as removed as possible from the work, as does Vigo.44 And,
like Vigo, Weiner also transforms his audience into artists, since, for
Weiner, “anyone making a reproduction of my art is making art just
as valid as if I had made it.”45
Weiner’s pieces/instructions, such as his ONE QUART GREEN
EXTERIOR INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK
WALL, or his A 36 X 36 REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR
SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A
WALL, both of 1968, could engender objects as well as actions,
while the majority of Vigo’s projects to be realized were intended
to induce experiences. And whereas Weiner was responding to
New York minimalism (especially evident in his statement that “the
piece may be fabricated,” as many minimalist works were during
the 1960s) Vigo was reacting to his local context, one tense with
the threat of violence, and preparing such works to be sent abroad
through the mail. Nevertheless, both artists began their activities
as means of circumventing commercial art galleries and delivering
their pieces directly to the public, who became complicit in completing the works. For both, the presence of language was enough
for these pieces to exist as works of art.
Yet the most compelling parallels between Vigo’s projects to
be realized and international artistic occurrences are with the
proto-conceptual “event scores” created by George Brecht and
other future Fluxus artists who met in John Cage’s class on
Experimental Music at the New School for Social Research in
New York in 1958–59. Fluxus events act as frames that spotlight
extra-artistic phenomena, thereby positing characteristically
un-artistic or every-day actions and sounds as valid artistic
material, as does Vigo. Reflecting Cagean notions of indeterminacy
and “purposeful purposelessness or purposeless play,” as well as
the context in which they were created, most Fluxus events are
presented as musical pieces, though the majority focus as much
on the found aspect of the actions performed as on the incidental
sounds produced as a consequence.46 As Fluxus Chairman George
Maciunas observed in reference to Brecht’s Light Piece of 1962, event
performances often constitute “ready-made actions” because “you
turn the light on and then off every day . . . without even knowing
you’re performing George Brecht.”47
“I tried to develop the ideas I’d had during Cage’s course
and that’s where my ‘events’ come from,” Brecht explained in an
interview. “I wanted to make music that wouldn’t be for the ears.
Music isn’t just what you hear or what you listen to, but everything
that happens.”48 Most Fluxus events fit within two general categories.
One strain of events posits musical instruments and traditions of
musical performance as suitable materials for parody and play; the
other consists of breaking down the “everything that happens” into
discreet units that celebrate mundane activities and occurrences
as art, as Vigo does in Actions Interconnected by Means of Sequences,
among other works. All are presented as pithy statements on small
cards, and can be performed by anyone regardless of authorship—
Flux artists and audience members alike. Brecht’s assertion that “In
principle, everybody could use the event scores as paradigms and
invent their own whenever they wanted to” eradicates distinctions
between artist and audience and leaves receivers’ creativity unbounded, aspirations at the heart of Vigo’s projects to be realized.49
Brecht, like Cage, characterized his work as “an involvement with
processes,”50 but processes that instead of “creating something new”
simply “bring things into evidence” that are “already there,” much
as Vigo attempted to do in, for instance, his Cluster of Streetlights
event.51 Yet while Brecht recognized language’s inherent ambiguity
as an intrinsic source of indeterminacy, allowing for many possible
renditions of his event scores, Vigo’s projects were more consciously
defined. Brecht’s best-known events, like Violin Solo (Polish), Flute
Solo (Disassembling; Assembling), String Quartet (Shaking Hands),
Concert for Orchestra (Exchanging), and Piano Piece (Center), all of
1962, illustrate his propensity for performative “one-liners” that
spoof conventional concert behavior, confounding the audience’s
expectations by presenting “non-musical” or behind-the-scenes
actions as the main attraction. 52 For example, since the verbs
intended to spark the action are isolated in parentheses without
subjects or objects, for Concert for Orchestra (Exchanging) performers
could feasibly exchange anything they had at hand (instruments,
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notes, sheet music, chairs, shoes, hats). As Brecht explicitly stated,
“it’s implicit in the scores that any realization is feasible.”53
This indeed is what Vigo intended in his projects to be realized,
manifest most clearly in the final page of the last issue of Diagonal
Cero in 1968. This simple sheet with a round hole punched in its
upper quadrant invites recipients to “Make your visual poem/
painting/ object/ sculpture/ landscape/ still life/ nude/ (self) portrait/
interior and any other kind and genre of art.” Its “mode of use” is to
“place at a prudential distance before your eye and frame with free
liberty the genre you desire.” For Vigo, as for the Flux artists who
performed Brecht’s events at Fluxus Festivals around the world in
the early to mid-1960s, conceptualism was an opportunity to spur
others to creative action and play.
This emphasis on participation and play, and his penchant for
the absurd, differentiate Vigo’s works from that of other conceptual
artists in Argentina and elsewhere. The sole Latin American artist
to arrive at conceptual art via poetry, he was also the only South
American artist to send conceptual artworks by mail. Just as his
relativuzgirs constitute intermediary steps between art, poetry,
and participatory action, on Vigo’s journey from concrete art to
conceptualism via Dada and process poetry, projects to be realized
ultimately serve as frames for action and experience, and their paper
supports, as lenses through which life and art look indistinguishable.
7
8
9
10
11
12
r
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
Jorge Glusberg, De la figuración al arte de sistemas: Luis Fernando Benedit,
Nicolás García Uriburu, Edgardo Antonio Vigo (Buenos Aires: CAYC, 1970), p. 10.
This and all subsequent translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.
Ibid.
Vigo, Obras (in)completas, 1969. [. . . respetando la teoría de un Arte de participación y una traslación de algunos porcentajes de la creación ubique donde
Ud. desea los mismos.] Emphasis in the original.
Vigo, “Declaraciones fundamentales,” 1968, reproduced in exhibition brochure
for Edgardo Antonio Vigo: Poeta a la distancia, Galería I.C.I. (Buenos Aires,
August 1997). [Un arte de expansión, de atrape por vía lúdica, que facilite la
participación—activa—del espectador vía absurdo [. . .] No más contemplación
sino actividad.]
For example, Vigo’s Expo/Internacional de la Novísima Poesía, held at the Buenos
Aires Di Tella Institute from March to April, 1969, and later at La Plata’s Museo
Provincial de Bellas Artes in April to May of the same year, included more than
150 innovative works by poets from 15 countries, including Europe, the Unites
States, and South America.
The Noigandres poets of São Paulo included Neide, Álavro de Sá, and Décio
Pignatari.
13
14
15
16
17
18
For example, number 13 contained a section on “Poesía joven del Paraguay” as
well as a “Pequeña antología del bolsillo de poetas mexicanos,” two poems by a
Venezuelan poet and a manifesto from a Nicaraguan artist; number 14 included
the “Segunda antología del bolsillo de poetas mexicanos” and a “Pequeña
antología de poesía uruguaya”; and number 17 contained a “Breve antología
de la joven poesía chilena.” Woodcuts by artists from various Latin American
countries were featured throughout the magazine’s 28 issues, especially after
1966 when Vigo’s mail art practice began.
Eduardo Costa, Roberto Jacoby, and Raúl Escari, “Un arte de los medios de
comunicación,” manifesto, 1966. Reprinted in Oscar Masotta, Happenings
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1967) p.17.
For more information on conceptual art in Argentina, see Mari Carmen
Ramirez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America,
1960-1980,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York:
Queens Museum of Art, 1999), and Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin
America: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972
(Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. ix.
For example, one reviewer of From Figuration to Systems Art in Argentina, held
at the Camden Arts Centre in 1971, writes: “[Vigo’s] designs incorporate
allusive additives of the kind we have come to associate with Kurt Schwitters;
envelopes, tickets, etc. but their presence in his compositions serves secondary
purposes. They guide the eye’s thinking along lines predefined by his use
of letter forms and his handling of these has the sensuously perfect silence
of Arp’s sculptures. He discovers a native graphic dynamism in the western
script’s units which can be bent to serve his own sensitive purposes. In his
free-standing objects he tends to display ambiguously phrased definitions of
intent and their minimal sculptured volumes underline, as jokes do, a point
of his own. His empty scrolls, for instance, represent volumes of his Obras
(in)completas. In fact, his punning is exact and realised in accordance with
ornamentally valid arguments.” Review found without date, publication, or
author in Vigo’s archive, La Plata.
The importance of Denise René’s Gallery as a haven for international abstract
artists cannot be overestimated. René promoted “hard-edge,” Constructivist
abstraction as well as kinetic and Op art, while others embraced art informel,
and her gallery provided a meeting place for emerging and established
abstractionists in the early 1950s.
Vigo, “Declaraciones fundamentales,” op cit. [un arte tocable]
The Argentine Madí movement, founded in 1946, advocated invention rather
than representation and published a magazine to express their views, Arte
Madí Universal, published between 1947 and 1950. Its primary members
included Gyula Kosice, Carmelo Arden Quin, Martín Blaszko, and Rhod
Rothfuss. Kosice’s articulated sculptures were meant to be manipulated into
various configurations by the public. For more information on Madí, see
Gradowczyk and Perazzo, Abstract Art from the Río de la Plata, 1933–1953 (New
York: Americas Society, 2001), pp. 42–44.
Vigo, “De la poesía/proceso a la poesía para y/o a realizar,” (Diagonal Cero:
La Plata, 1969), p. 9. [Y hablamos de lu lúdico como puente de contacto en
diferentes formas de encarar el arte, porque está comprobado que esa es la
única vía posible para que la sociedad retome su interés y participación en el
fenomeno de arte.]
Cargador eléctrico, 1957, modified in 1974. [para senos, para sombras chinescas,
para levantarse a sí mismo, para carga de electricidad, para evadirse de lo
sexual]
Vigo, catalogue for Expo/Internacional de la Novisima Poesía, 1969. [. . . la constante
poética y su cuota de misterio y asombro.]
In a letter to Julien Blaine dated July 22, 1992, Vigo explained that a project
of sending 25 letters to phony addresses was a simple play with the postal
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19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
service. “Both the character and the addresses were pure creations of mine.”
Vigo archive, La Plata, Argentina.
Cited by María José Herrera, “Vigo en (con)texto,” in Edgardo-Antonio Vigo
(Espacio Fundación Telefónica: Buenos Aires, 2004), p. 14. Vigo also used the
term to designate drawings and collages produced in the 1950s. [“Lo relativo,
base filosófico-matemática de Einstein, la electricidad como elemento
actuante y la propriedad de girar, es decir escaparse de la REPRESENTACIÓN
del movimiento por el movimiento en sí.”] Emphasis in the original.
Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do não-objeto,” in Jornal do Brasil (Sunday Supplement), 21 November 1960. Reproduced in Aracy A. Amaral, ed. Projeto
construtivo brasileiro na arte, 1950–62 (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: MECFUNARTE, 1977), pp. 90–94.
Dias-Pino continues, “Poema/Processo is that which, in each new experience,
introduces informational processes. This information can be esthetic or
not: the important thing is that it be functional, and in this way, consumed.”
Cf Dias-Pino, “Processo, Linguagem, e Comunicação,” Revista de Cultura
Vozes, 1971, and Álvaro de Sá and Moacy Cirne, “Do Modernismo ao Poema/
Processo e ao Poema Experimental,” Vozes, 1972, Vol. LXXI, N. 1, Jan/Feb,
1978.
An earlier version of this text, “Un arte a realizar,” appeared in the La Plata
magazine Ritmo, N. 3, 1969.
Vigo staged an exhibition entitled Exposición de Novísima Poesía de Vanguardia
in May of 1968 in Buenos Aires Galería Scheinson with works by La Plata
poets Carlos Raúl Ginzburg, Jorge de Luxán Gutiérrez, Luis Pazos, and
Vigo himself, presented with a text by French poet Julien Blaine. From an
unpublished, undated manuscript found in Vigo’s archive, “Panorama sintético
de la poesía visual en Argentina.”
In Neide de Sá, Alvarez de Sá, and Décio Pignatari’s “Pilot Program for
Concrete Poetry,” Noigandres, N. 4, 1958.
Vigo, “De la poesía/proceso a la poesía para y/o a realizar,” op cit., p.10. [La
posibilidad del arte no está ya sólo en la participación del observador sino
en su ACTIVACIÓN-constructiva, un ARTE A REALIZAR que quemó las
divisiones de los géneros heredados y va a la meta de la integración total.”]
Emphasis in the original.
Ibid., p. 27. [un “proyecto modificable” en grado sumo [. . .] permite cambios
suplantaciones y agredados ya sea de materiales o de estructuras formales
en aprovechamiento de lo lúdico [. . .] basada en la participación realmente
activa (y no condicionada) del “constructor.”] Emphasis in the original.
Historieta para armar, 1971. [Aguece su ingenio y proceda. Le damos a ud.
las CLAVESMINIMAS. Coloreé, déle ritmo, llene las burbujas y anime los
personajes. El resultado (que de ud. depende) puede ser: una historia de amor
de guerra de pistoleras o política (se anima?) Luego, quédese con ella, lúzcala,
destrúyala y venga a buscar otra para insistir . . . o le proponemos traerla para
se expuesta en nuestra vidriera y compartir su resultado.]
Vigo, Manual and Instructions for the Construction of a (Western and Christian)
“Work of Art,”1969.
Vigo, Manifesto for Manojo de Semáforos, 1968. [un análisis estético y creativo
del manojo de semáforos ubicado en las calles 1 y 60 de La Plata]
Ibid. [acto de investigación estética gratuita]
“Un paseo visual a la Plaza Rubén Darío, 1970. [[. . .] grabe en ud. lo visto,
saque sus conclusiones, en definitiva ud. ha realizado “UN PASEO VISUAL A
LA PLAZA RUBÉN DARÍO.”]
Acciones interconectadas por sequencias, 1973. Vigo’s translation.
Ibid. [PRESENTACIÓN en lugar de REPRESENTACIÓN] Emphasis in the
original.
(In)conferencia (de la serie Actos a Realizar n. 0001/69) [Decida un día alejarse
o acercarse a un lugar portando la presente invitación y proceda diclar,
mascullar, cantar, silbar, agitar o bambolear su cuerpo, etc., no decir su propia
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
conferencia. Por razones solidárias se ruega asistir a las demás (in)conferencias.]
Cf Alberto Greco (Valencia, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Centro Julio
González, 1991), and Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity:
Conceptualism in Latinn America, 1960–1980,” in Global Conceptualism: Points
of Origin 1950s–1980s (New York; The Queens Museum of Art, 1999), p. 61.
Cf Piero Manzoni (Los Angeles Museum of Art; Comuni di Roma, Palazzo di
Esposizioni; Ravenna, 1995).
Vigo continues, “ Everyone has the right to take other names, facts, and
actions for their PROSPECT FROM THE PAST that enables each one his
panorama for the adventure-apocalypse. Further, their selection will open
polemics because for some, my names could come from other fields. My
elective base is the hermeticism of their labyrinthine languages that propels the search to untwine the tangled web of their proposals.” [MARCEL
DUCHAMP, KURT SCHWITTERS, MACEDONIO FERNÁNDEZ,
ALBERTO GRECO, XUL SOLAR. Serán mis seis nombres. No son
exclusivos ni únicos, simplemente son míos. [. . .] Es derecho de cada uno
tomar de la PROSPECTIVA DEL PASADO otros nombres, hechos, y
acciones que nos permiten aclarar para cada cual el panorama de la
aventura-apocalipsis. Incluso, abrirá polémicas su selección porque para
algunos, mis nombres podrían prevenir del otro campo. Mi base electiva, es
el hermeticismo de sus laberínticos lenguajes que promueven el recorrido
para desanudar la madeja de sus propuestas.] From Vigo’s “PROSPECTIVA
DEL PASADO,” undated, found among Vigo’s files, Vigo archive. Emphasis
in the original.
Vigo collected a wide variety of books, from art history and theory to psychoanalysis, most dating to the post-war period and stored at the Vigo
archive in La Plata. He accumulated a considerable amount of publications
on Dada and Surrealism, as well as an important collection of writings on
Duchamp.
The Mexico City 1969 translation includes essays by Duchamp (‘El acto creativo”), Leo Steinberg (“El arte contemporáneo y la confusión de su público”),
Greenberg (“La pintura modernista”), Max Kozloff (“La esquitsofrenia crítica
y el método intecionalista”), Susan Sontag (“El escenario del arte y el arte de
no saber escribir”), Lucy Lippard (“Cartas de Nueva York, 1965: Reinhardt,
Duchamp, Morris”), Ad Reinhardt (“Escritos”), John Cage (“Jasper Johns: Ideas
y anécdotas”), Leo Steinberg (“Las cuadras de Paul Brach”), Samuell Adam
Green (“Andy Warhol”).
The complete title is: An anthology of chance operations, concept art, anti art,
indeterminacy, plans of action, diagrams, music, dance constructions, improvisation,
meaningless work, natural disasters, compositions, mathematics, essays, poetry (New
York: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, 1963).
Vigo often transcribed texts that interested him with his typewriter, frequently
arranging the words on the page to create typographical designs. One assumes
that these texts were taken from borrowed books, translated by his wife Elena
Comas, and then transcribed by the artist.
Lippard’s efforts to create “‘suitcase exhibitions’ of dematerialized art that
would be taken from country to country by ‘idea artists’ using free airline
tickets” culminated in three shows, each titled according to the population
of each city. The first was staged in Seattle (557,807); the second in Vancouver
( 955,000); and the final exhibition was held at the CAYC and was “a more
strictly conceptual and portable exhibition.” Lippard, op. cit., p. xi.
Published in Arts Magazine, April 1970.
Weiner terms his verbal “statements” “sculptures,” insisting that “we all know
that even a sentence is an object. Everything is an object.” In “Lawrence
Weiner: Interview with Lynn Gumpert,” in Lynda Benglis, Joan Brown, Luis
Jimenez, Gary Stephan, Lawrence Weiner: Early Work (New York: New Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1982), p. 53.
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Anamesa / Essay
45 Weiner, “October 12, 1969,” in Ursula Meyer, Conceptual Art, (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1971), p. 217.
46 Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1961), p. 12.
47 Transcript of the videotaped “Interview with George Maciunas by Larry
Miller,” March 24, 1978, in Fluxus etc./Addenda 1, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman
Collection (Detroit, 1983), p. 21.
48 George Brecht, in “An Interview with George Brecht by Irmeline Leeber,” in
An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire (Milan, 1978), p. 84.
49 Ibid., p. 119.
50 Ibid., p. 80.
51 George Brecht, in “A Conversation about Something Else: An Interview with
George Brecht by Ben Vautier and Marcel Alocco,” in An Introduction to George
Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire, op. cit., p. 68.
52 It is difficult to pinpoint many of Brecht’s event scores’ exact dates since the
majority were printed on small paper cards and sold in “box-sets” like Water
Yam, printed in 1962. It is safe to assume that the bulk of these scores were
created between 1958 and 1962.
53 George Brecht, in “An Interview with George Brecht by Michael Nyman,” in
An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire, op. cit., p. 108.
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Edgardo Antonio Vigo`s Proyectos a Realizar

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