Crossing the Cactus Curtain:
Politics and Isolation Test the Committment of Latin American Artists

John Held Jr.

Chilean painter Eugenio Dittborn called the first meeting of his country's Mail Artists to order on the second floor of a nameless resturant on Calle Huerfanos in Santiago late 1985. Dittborn, later to be the only Chilean invited to the 1992 Documenta, was concluding a workshop for students on Mail Art, and had invited artists Carlos Montes de Oca, Patricio Rueda, Gonzalo Mellan, and the late Victor Hugo Codecedra to discuss their situation of isolation, and how Mail Art could play a part in overcoming this. Guillermo Diesler, who had been forced to flee the country to Bulgaria due to the political situation, was back in Chile for fifteen days and was enroute to the meeting. But he never arrived, and the meeting was momentarily interrupted as a riot ensued on the street below in protest of the prevailing Pinochet dictatorship. As tear gas wafted up to the second floor, the meeting continued. The participants cynically commented that only in their country could a discussion of art be held under such adverse conditions.

The political and economic turbulence which swirls around the alternative artists of Latin America has had a profound effect on the way they approach art. It is seemingly impossible for the socially aware cultural worker to conduct art for art's sake in such a situation of grave peril to one's fellow man.

Clemente Padin, the organizer of the first Mail Art show in Latin America, was sentenced to four years imprisonment in a Uruguyan prison for satirizing the military through his work. Edgardo-Antonio Vigo, an early practitioner of Visual Poetry from Argentina, has had to deal with the "disappearence" of his son Palomo under a military dictatorship run amok. Argentine Graciela G. G. Marx has embraced collaborative projects and a philosophy of "poetry in everyday living" as a way to eliminate the distance between artist and artist, and the artist and her community. Eugenio Dittborn has forsaken traditional Mail Art for Air Mail Paintings to lessen the distance between himself and the centers of art, and of the isolation between cultures.

Clemente Padin was arrested on August 25, 1977 for ridiculing the power of the military with a sheet of artist postage stamps. His friend Jorge Caraballo was arrested some time later for complicity and served nine months. For the first three months, Padin was officially missing. There was no trial, because there was no law to cover his offense. During the next two years, he was transferred to five different prisons. The first three were unnamed, and he was transferred to each blindfolded.

In a performance he held in Berlin, West Germany, while on a DAAD fellowship in 1984, he re-enacted the various forms of torture he endured in a piece called, "For Art and Peace." On November 1, 1979, he was released from the Penal de Libertad (Freedom Penitentury), after an intensive letterwriting campaign conducted by the international art community secured his release.
This effort has recently been documented in his work, "Caraballo and Padin: Solidaridad Uruguay."

Padin was born in Lascano, Rocha, Uruguay, on October 8, 1939. He studied Spanish Literature at the University of Uruguay. From 1966 to 1969, he edited the magazine Los Huevos del Plata (The Eggs of Silver), and from 1969 through 1974, the magazine Ovum 10. A performance of 1970 entitled, "The Poetry Should Be Done For Everyone," mirror the objectives of his publications, which were, "To integrate different languages in only one type of expression. Make the creative particpation of the spectators. The work of art is a process of permanent creation." These forays into experimental and visual poetry brought Padin into contact with a wide array of international vanguard artists. His first Mail Art action was a post card of visual poetry he circulated in 1967.
These were first sent to Latin American artists and poets such as Edgardo-Antonio Vigo and the late Damasco Ogaz of Venuzuala.
Shortly thereafter, Padin came in contact with the Fluxus artists and began corresponding with Dick Higgins, George Macunias, Wolf Vostell, Ben Vautier, and such early European Mail Art practitioners as Albrecht D. and Timm Ulrichs. Other correspondents included Joseph Beuys, Julien Blaine of France, who edited DOC(K)S magazine, and the Canadian group General Idea, who were editing FILE magazine in the early seventies. Most of this early material was confiscated and never returned by the Uruguyan police at the time of his arrest.

In a text published by Julien Blaine in 1975, "From the Representation to the Action," Padin sums up the poetic direction of his work. Proposals for an art without objects are developed, which culminate in a move from language towards a direct and immediate impact upon reality. This is manifested in his performance of the same year at the Museo de Arte Contemporáno in Sao Paulo, Brasil, called, "The Artist is at the Service of the Community," in which video monitors, loudspeakers, and banners proclaimed the themes of, "Love. Solidarity. Justice. Friendship. Art." The anoynomous artists ("keep the name of the artist unknown with the purpose of emphasing the social character of the work") explained to the public the purpose of action, the works of art exhibited, and the artistic activity of vanguard art and it's objectives.

Padin has also collaborated with fellow Latin American alternative artists in such performances as "Fasting for Liberation in Latin America'," which was undertaken with Argentine and Uruguyan artists Graciela Gutiérrez Marx, Susana Lombardo, Mamablanca, Claudio De León, Martín Echmeyer, Nicteroi Argañaraz, Verónica Orta, Carlos Pamparana, Mariel Rothberg, and Jorge Orta.
Held at the Seminary of Contemporary Art, Rosario, Argentina, on August 31, 1984, the group resolved to recognize, "the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, liberation of all the political prisioners, the return of exiles, reapparition with life of all the disapeared people, deregulation of the repressive legislation, disarticulation of the repressive apparatus, and for the reafirmation of human rights to live a full and dignfied life in a climate of social justice." That evening they announced the formation of the Latin American and Carribean Mail Art Association.

Since that time, Graciela Grace Gutiérrez Marx, has edited the published organ of the Association, Hoje, Hoja, Hoy, to inform the Latin American alternative arts community of the "efforts to obtain better and more human conditions of life, within the frame of peace and social justice." This has been accomplished through such collaborative exhibitions as "Missing Politics in Our America," "Nicaragua: Native Land or Death," "Chile will Overcome," "El Salvador, Testimonial Graphic," We Love Your Paraguay," "For the Freedom in Latin America and in the Caribe," and "Five Hundred Years of Genocide and Colonialism."

The voyage of Graciela Marx of La Plata, Argentina, from visual artist to freedom fighter and socially active artist is an especially moving tale. As a nineteen year old sculptor, she had her first exhibition in 1961. The following year an exhibition of hers was reviewed by newspaper critic Edgardo-Antonio Vigo, who regarded her as a copyist. Although angered, Marx was drawn to Vigo's writings and work. Their paths crossed again when Marx replaced Vigo as a professor at the National College in La Plata. Marx and Vigo (born 1928) also shared an interest in visual poetry, and he informed her of the international movements which were occuring around this form. He did not, however, encourage her to participate in these activities.

It was not until 1975, when Vigo and Horace Zabala were curating the "Last Mail Art Show" in Buenos Aries, that Marx became involved in Mail Art - at the behest of Zabala. One half-hour before the show was to open the police came and censored the show. The following year, the military took over the country and many things changed. Zabala went to Italy to escape the repression. He became well-known in alternative art circles for his phrase. "Art is a Prison."

In May 1976, hooded militia arrived at the door of Edgardo-Antonio Vigo. They demanded of his wife Elena that they be taken to see the Vigo's son Palomo. Similar actions were occuring in other homes throughout the country. Young people, who were affiliated with the Peronist movement and had gone to the villages to work with the poorest people of the country were being systimatically taken from their homes and "disappeared." Elena ran to her husband to inform him of the situation. Edgardo-Antonio looked out the second-story window of his home to see his hooded and shackled son being lead off. It was the last time he ever saw Palomo.

The only organized opposition to the military at this time were the mothers of the disappeared. They would gather at the great plazas of the major cities with large photos of their missing sons demanding information about their condition. Edgardo-Antonio and Elena Vigo were numb with the lose of their son. Despite their shock, they had to deal with the upbringing of the rest of their family. It was at this point that Graciela Marx volunteered to take up the cause of Palomo Marx. She raised his banner and marched with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.

This act of courage was not lost on Edgardo-Antonio Vigo. His previous hesitation to collaborate with Graciela Marx was overcome. Each year since 1971, Vigo celebrated August 22 as a personal ritual. On August 22, 1977, he came to the house of Graciela Marx and included her in his action of that year. He admitted that he admired her work and two weeks later invited her to jointly enter a Japanese Mail Art show with a cooperative signature, G. E. Vigo Marx. This began a relationship that lasted until 1981.

To begin their collaboration they held a ritual mixing their blood and burying intertwined pieces of their hair. They began making Mail Art together; entering various international exhibitions, producing multiples, and organizing projects, such as "Poetical Architiecture."

I remember my own confusion during this time of collaboration. I thought that this was a married couple. I surmissed later that they had divorced. Graciela says that when the collaboration ended most Mail Artists thought she had died and no longer wrote to her. In 1983, an exhibition of the collaborative works of G. E. Marx Vigo was held at the Cultural Museo de Telecomunicaciones in Buenos Aires, which commemorated their work together. The exhibition, "Circuito de Comunicacion a Distancia," featured Mail Art and the documentation of a performence they collaborated on in which they launched ballons with attached fetished objects.
At the time of the formation of the Asociación Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Artiscorreo, in Rosario, Argentina, in 1984, it was decided by the assembled artists to "use the stratiges of Mail Art with the people of our own cities, and enter into collaborations of collective collage." This Graciela Marx has done in a number of ways. But perhaps her most impressive collaboration is with her own family, which expresses her concern that "poetry is to be lived all day long."

>From the time Graciela was two she was encouraged by her mother to draw. A quiet person without many friends, Mamablanca was a primary school teacher throughout her life. On her seventy-fifth birthday, Graciela presented her with a white box filled with congratulations from Mail Artists throughout the world, who had contributed to the project, "The First Codicies of Mamablanca," at Graciela's behest. Upon receiveng the beautiful works of art, Mamablancea cried and asked her daughter why these beautiful things were sent to a nobody like herself. Graciela answered that in Mail Art there is no such thing as a nobody. From that day, until her death in January 1991, Mamablanca became a participant in Mail Art.

Her son Martín Raúl Eckmeyer also participates in Mail Art. From 1978 to 1988 Graciela and Martín made collaborative drawings of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and their "disappeared." These drawings were published in the book, Hebe: Memoria y Esperanza, by Alejandro Diago, in 1988. The work of mother and son paralleled the conviction of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo that their sons spoke through them, and they through their sons. And likewise, Marx is convinced that if she cannot share her enthusiasm for art with her family, it is probably an unworthy pursuit. For Graciela Marx, true art infuses life and improves the human condition.

While Padin and Marx have been content to work at the margins of the art institutions in their country, Eugenio Dittborn has enveloped himself in the lessons of Mail Art and used them as a Trojan Horse to infiltrate the highest bastions of the art establishment. Today he is one of Chile's most notable artists, and is the only artist from his country to be represented at the prestigious documenta 9 art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. "A virus can infiltrate," he relates, "but it must take the form of the host body."

He stopped his activity in Mail Art, because, "the objects are not very good. They have not the traces of their postal activity." Instead of voicing his criticism of the medium, which he still admires for it's "nomadic" quality, Dittborn ceased his postal activity with the network, and embarked upon a hybrid form, which he calls Air Mail Paintings. His recent paintings are folded and sent through the mail. The paintings as well as the envelopes are displayed. They are very large. The work he showed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in January1992 in a group show called, "The Isolated Body," is a triptych over fourteen meters. The work he will show in Belgium this in 1992 is eight meters wide and three meters high. Each painting is sixteen times smaller when folded. The creases in the paintings, reflecting their passage through the postal system, becomes an intregal part of the work.

Whether the Latin American artist chooses to work on the margins of the art establishment or to participate at the highest levels of international competition, there are barriers to be crossed and overcome. The feelings of isolation are strong. There is an overwhelming feeling that they are far from the centers of art in which the pulse of the currents of contemporary art are beating.
The forces of political repression also exact a toll. To pursue art in such a climate demands a fierce committment. It also demands that the artist find someway to integrate the creative process with the aspirations of the society. Without this synthesis, the art becomes a puerile vocation. But with it, art becomes a quest for a utopian reality, a true test of the artist's courage, and an inspiration for others to follow.