Writing to the General, and Other Aesthetic Strategies of Critique: The Art of León Ferrari as a Practice of Freedom

Abstract

This article considers the long career of Argentine artist León Ferrari, from its beginnings to the midst of military dictatorship, through his political exile, to his return to a renewed democracy that nevertheless remains in need of critique. It approaches his oeuvre as the story of an artist's ‘practices of freedom’, in Michel Foucault's sense, a story that is an exploration of the different modes of critique, witnessing and critical contestation that one encounters in Ferrari's artworks. Foucault's thought frames this exploration insofar as it enables one to understand Ferrari's art as a series of experiments in critique executed in different periods and hence in different political configurations. Since this is the case, the artworks also enable one to reflect upon how one can conceive of art's ethical role, how it might be thought to insert and assert itself within the lines of power and subjectification.

Acknowledgements

With many thanks to the AHRC for funding the research on which this article draws. All images reproduced with kind permission of the Augusto and León Ferrari Foundation, except figure 8 (MOMA, New York) and figures 12 and 13, photographs by the author.

Notes

 1 Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’ in Lawrence Kritzman, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture (Interviews and other writings 1977–1984) (London: Routledge, 1988), 155.

 2 ‘Practicing Criticism’, 155.

 3 Han, Beatrice Han, Foucault's Critical Project (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Translated by Edward Pile), 193.

 4 With neo-liberal notions of the reinvention of the self (as argued by McNay, 2009) as well as with what Benjamin famously described as the ‘aestheticisation of politics’ in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (ed. Hannah Arendt, Stocken: New York, 1986).

 5 And that they arguably never fully resolve, as argued by Han, 2002.

 6 Butler, Judith ‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue’ (2002) in The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy David Ingram, ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

 7 As a part of the Didier interview Foucault made clear that the process of critique and transformation he was describing there required a ‘free atmosphere’, for the ‘constant agitation’ of permanent criticism requires such. Foucault, ‘Practicing Criticism’, 155.

 8 Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs From Auschwitz (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). Translated by Shane B. Lillis.

 9 Foucault's The Order of Things was published in 1966. Perez-Oramas also makes this point.

10 Her parents wrote down a list of simple words that she had been able to speak, in order to help to teach her to speak again. León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004, 73.

11 The period prior to Ferrari's Carta works was turbulent. A series of events made it so. There had been the dramatic forced resignation (arrest and then exile) of Perén and the coup of 1955 before a return to civilian rule in 1958 following a period of pressure, including strikes, instigated by Peronists. During Frondizi's presidency, he moved from courting the Peronists to opposing them, proposing to lift the ban on Peronist candidates in elections only because he was convinced his UCRI party would defeat them. In the next coup, that of 1962, the military removed Frondizi in order to block the Peronists' return. The military was now deeply divided, both in relation to the Peronist party as well as in relation to whether there should be a political process at all. In 1963, when Ferrari made Carta, the military controlled the country through a puppet government; it had named José María Guido, president pro tempore of the national Senate, provisional President.

12 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text (New York: The Noonday Press, 1977), 64. Translated by Stephen Heath.

13 Andrea Giunta, ‘A Language Rhapsody’ in Pérez-Oramas, 51.

14 Quoted in León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004 Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta/MALBA, 2004), 376. Ferrari felt it was not safe to return to look for his son, nor even to report his son's disappearance. Only later, when the truth of his death was confirmed, did the family speak to the authorities, and then it was to the Italian authorities that Ferrari appealed for justice, obtaining citizenship there through his father's ancestry and filing his case there. Ferrari discovered from Graciela Daleo, who herself was detained in ESMA, that Ariel had been killed in a confrontation with Alfredo Astiz and other military personnel outside Ariel's house. Nor did Ariel's partner, who attempted to find him, ever return.

15 Ferrari makes this remark in the video interview ‘The Architecture of Madness’, 2002, available on www.youtube.com and it is referenced in Giunta, A Language Rhapsody, 2009, 57.

16 See http://www.literatura.org/Walsh/rw240377.html, last accessed 29/3/2010, for his Open Letter to the Military Junta and http://fotografiasdeandresditella.blogspot.com, last accessed 28/3/2010 for his letters to his daughter.

17 Emilio Crenzel, ‘Cartas a Videla: una exploración sobre el miedo, el terror y la memoria’ Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios Latinoamericanos (IIELA), 2–3 (2010). Crenzel contrasts Walsh's letter with the letter from the workers in the mortuary in Córdoba that detailed the shocking lack of procedures and appalling conditions in which they were being asked to work, with an excessive amount of bodies being delivered to the mortuary, which had insufficient refrigeration facilities.

18 The practice of parrhesia: a form of speaking the truth to power that was conceptualised slightly differently between Plato and the texts of Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus some four or five centuries later, as different conceptions of the self and its ‘care’ emerged and that is of interest to us here not least because of the idea that one might pay attention to the manner in which truth is spoken rather than, say, its accuracy or efficacy. Foucault introduces parrhesia as a mode of speaking the truth by eliminating certain hypotheses about what this manner of truth-speaking might be: it was not, he explains, a strategy of demonstration, since it was not about rational structures of discourse; nor was it a mode of rhetoric, since it was not a specific art of persuasion; nor was parrhesia a pedagogy that proceeds from simple to complex, from simple elements to the ensemble; and finally, nor was it an eristic mode of confrontation which would be to see it as a victory of aggressive argumentation. See Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the College de France 1982–3 Trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). First published in French 2008.

19 Foucault discusses ‘la tentative de meurtre’ of Plato through which he suggests that the threat comes because the interlocutor is in the presence of a truth that he cannot accept but is unable to reject, a truth that faces him with injustice, excess, madness, blindness, in “The Government of Self”, 54.

20 Andrea Giunta Avant–Garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentinean Art in the 1960s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 259.

21 General Onganía stated: ‘We are committed to the common cause of the Americas, that is, to defend our Western, Christian way of life against the advances of red totalitarianism’(quoted in Nunca Más, 1985: 443). Andrea Giunta has suggested the piece drew upon Dadaism and surrealism, bringing together supposedly the ‘distant’ realities of war and Christianity, uniting them with clear ‘socially disruptive intent’ (Giunta, 2007), 259.

22 In Cuba (1961), Panama (1964) and Santo Domingo (1965). Although the connection is not made, the bombs that were dropped on Buenos Aires by the Argentine military in June 1955 in their attempt to remove Perón also reportedly carried the words ‘Cristo Vence’ on them (Miguel, 2011).

23 Although at this point, this critique of art and the privilege of the di Tella institute was not his main focus and he would go on to exhibit at the di Tella two years later.

24 Giunta, Avant Garde, 260.

25 Ferrari, ‘Respuesta del artista’ Propositos, October 7, 1965. Reproduced in León Ferrari, Prosa Política (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005), 14.

26 Andrea Guinta has shown how the artists of the time began to articulate the need to commit artistic creations, the argument that artists be a public force, a desire that their work could contribute to social change. Throughout the decade, fuelled by international events, crucially the Cuban revolution and the war in Vietnam, as well as the events of May 1968 in Paris, Argentine artists argued over how to conceive of the avant-garde and the implications of anti-institutionalism. This period was one which saw leftist artists debating and experimenting with forms of rupture.

27 Giunta, Avant Garde, 268.

28 Some of these involved the artists publicly destroying their own works. In May, at the doorway of the di Tella Institute, artists destroyed their works in protest at the police's forced removal of an artwork, Roberto Plate's ‘bathroom’, on which the public had been encouraged to write their erotic and political responses. In June, Eduardo Ruano attacked his own artwork at the opening of a competition at the MOMA, shouting ‘Yankees out of Vietnam!’ And in July a group of artists protested about the French government's attempt to disallow reference to the May '68 events in Paris at a competition organised by the French embassy at the National Museum of Fine Arts, invading the museum and declaring their support for both the French students as well as the Argentine painter Julio Le Parc, who the French authorities had expelled because of his open support for the students (Sacco et al.; quoted in Giunta, Avant Garde, 269).

29 Quoted in Giunta, Avant Garde, 272.

30 Quoted in Sacco et al.

31 In Listen! Here! Now! (also quoted in Giunta 274). Garcia Canclini argued that art was no longer about a new style replacing another, but it was urgently about questioning the organisation of the artistic scene, its institutions and the symbolic strategies of the dominant classes. See Giunta, Avant Garde (2007), 275.

32 Julio Cortázar, ‘The Southern Thruway’ in All Fires the Fire, & Other Stories translated by Suzanne Jill Levine (London: Marion Boyars, 1979), 20.

33 Jacoby, 1987, quoted in Ferrari (2004), 378.

34 This point – that architects' visions of logic come to determine our movements – is made by De Salvo in an interview with Ferrari. She also nicely refers these pictures to the film Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 silent surrealist film by Dali and Buñuel which cuts between the insects on the man's hand and watching people from above through the window.

35 Quoted in Noé, Luis Felipe. 2004 ‘Visita a León Ferrari’ in León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras 1954-2004. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta/MALBA, 353.

36 In Malvido, 1982, quoted in Andrea Guinta, ‘Disturbing Beauty’ in Ferrari, Leon Ferrari: Retrospectiva, 347.

37 Artist's Notebook 1 1962–3. Collection of the artist. Quoted in Luis Pérez-Oramas, 23.

38 Some of these sculptures did explicitly address intimate, personal and human themes. For example, while most of the wire sculptures are untitled, a notable exception is ‘Lembrancas de meu pai’ (Memories of my father) (1977), which in many ways resembles the ‘untitled’ sculptures but, so titled, suggests something more: each soldered knot a memory of a beloved parent – Ferrari's father was also a painter – a bond, an interiority made visible through the removal of the boundary, the ‘skin’, between the spectator and interior. Made in this period, when his son was also missing, one cannot help feel moved by the sculpture as a meditation on fatherhood cut short.

39 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation & its Discontents (Penguin, 1985), 281.

40 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), 313.

41 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 54.

42 Grosz, 55. Recently, Ferrari has resurrected the idea of his sculptures as and with music. In 2011 his piece ‘Percanta’ has been shown with a series of musicians performing with/in it (see Pagina 12, 2011), and at El Parque de la Memoria, in March 2012, one of Ferrari's sculptures was again being played as part of the celebrations following the 24th March anniversary.

43 The declaration by the Concejo Deliberante that Nunca Más be required reading in schools had prompted this serialisation.

44 These references refer to the collected inserts, re-issued as a book by Pagina/12 and Eudeba (2006), 1.

45 CONADEP (2006), 22.

46 CONADEP (2006), 140.

47 6th October 1995, Pagina/12.

48 CONADEP, Nunca Más, 67–72; CONADEP, Nunca Más Ilustrado por León Ferrari, 236.

49 Information leaflet on Club Atlético produced by Espacio de la Memoria, collected 2011.

50 Story told by guide at ESMA (29/9/2011 visit).

51 Ferrari, Retrospectiva, 409.

52 The testimony here states that he heard people being tortured with the ‘picana eléctrica’ and on two occasions heard someone order it to stop with the words ‘se cortó’ (2006: 137).

53 Mignone's Witness to the Truth (1988) also contains much evidence of the Church's involvement in the dictatorship's strategies.

54 See also Emilio Crenzel, ‘El Nunca Más en fascaculos: el infierno resignificado’ Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe, 2007.

55 León Ferrari, León Ferrari: Retrospectiva, 410. First letter written 1997, and second in December 2000. Ferrari was not satisfied with the Pope's announcement that hell should be thought of as separation from God, even in this life. This merely ‘replaced physical suffering with spiritual torment’. Ferrari, León Ferrari: Retrospectiva, 410.

56 Over 90% of Argentina's population declare themselves as Catholic, although the percentage of ‘practising Catholics’ is closer to 20%.

57 Sam Binkley, ‘Kitsch as Repetitive System. A Problem for the Theory of Taste Hierarchy’ Journal of Material Culture 5, no.2 (2000), 141.

58 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1961), 102.

59 Binkley, 139.

60 Quoted in Binkley, 140.

61 Binkley, 140. As Binkley argues, the ‘failure of the kitsch artifact to realize the aesthetic objectives of high art brings the taster of kitsch closer to his own fundamental human quality – not the existential quality of disembedded man, but the all-too-human quality of folly itself, which, humanly, makes no bones about mistaking an imitation for an original’(141). Seen art-historically, kitsch ‘negates the pretenses of the robust individuality of high culture, allowing its subordination to the conventions of a more modest humanity, the humanity of petty vice, cutely forgiven’(141).

62 Binkley, 141.

63 Binkley's argument is that kitsch is a response and a corrective to contemporary life which is disembedded, uncertain and lacks continuity: ‘The excessive personal freedom, the uncertainty and the risk of modern social life is countered, in kitsch, with a return to a sense of continuity, a ‘closed system’, in Broch's phrase, in which cultural forms are predictable, continuous and repetitive – a quality of culture not easily pinned to a given social group or consuming segment, much less to an intrinsic hierarchy of forms’ (149). This last phrase refers to a conversation about post-Bourdieu analyses of social class understood through their different approaches to aesthetics.

64 As in Binkley's example, 145.

65 Ferrari, “Prosa Politica”, 45–6.

66 Theodor Adorno, Stars Down to Earth (London: Routledge, 1994), 123.

67 Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (London: Penguin, 1970), 31. First published 1944.

68 Borges, 40.

69 Borges, 42.

70 Borges, 59.

71 Adorno, 122.

72 Quoted in Soshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 147.

73 Interview by Alejandra Dandan Pagina/12, October 31, 2011.

74 Ferrari's 2004 retrospective at the Recoleta Cultural Centre in Buenos Aires created such a furore that the city's authorities ordered the exhibition to close. Later, with warning signs – stating that offence may be caused – duly posted on the doors and with no children allowed, it re-opened to queues of interested attendees, only for bomb threats to lead Ferrari himself to decide to close the exhibition early. The retrospective brought people out onto the streets, with demonstrations from opposing groups. There were those, on the one hand, who found the work irreverent, even sacrilegious, a charge entwined with that of anti-patriotism. Cardinal Bergoglio called the show a blasphemy and asked that the people of the city make atonement (reparación). Gathering on the streets in front of the Centre demonstrators chanted ‘Christ will win out! Christ reigns! Christ rules! Long live Christ the king! Long live our Country! (Viva la patria!)’. On the other hand, those who gathered to support Ferrari's right to show his work supported him with banners that rejected Church and State interference: ‘Listen everyone! The Inquisition has begun!’ and ‘Censorship is dictatorship!’ A frail but smiling Ferrari spoke to his crowd of supporters, thanking them for their affirmation of his work. His response to the enforced closure was as bold as ever, challenging the authorities who bow to the Catholic Church to consider its complicities with Argentina's past, pointing out that Videla had taken communion in the Church next door to the Cultural Centre, who were now so upset by the exhibition. There, he argued, they speak against gay people and against contraception, they uphold a belief in hell and purgatory, they say the Jews killed Jesus; which institution houses the greater insult and the greater threat?

75 As seen in Ferrari's documentary, Retrospectiva: Documental (directed by Pablo Padula).

76 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’ in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984), ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 286. Interview conducted January 20, 1984. The work of ethics was a lifetime's work for the sake of a beautiful, admirable, exemplary existence throughout one's life, since an ethical existence was not understood as the embodiment of a knowledge that is to be learnt and applied but is a mode of living, constantly practised across the whole of one's life and in all spheres, encompassing all one's relations, not solely the public. Foucault distinguished this ethics from an earlier Platonic idea of ethics as a preparation for adulthood and a later Christian notion of preparation for an after-life. Foucault “The Ethics of the Concern”, 235.

77 Luis Pérez-Oramas, León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets (New York: MOMA, 2009), 19.

78 Aracy Amaral ‘León Ferrari: los años paulistas (1976–ca. 1984)’ in León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004, Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta/MALBA, 2004), 357.

79 Luis Felipe Noé, ‘Visita a León Ferrari’ in León Ferrari: Retrospectiva. Obras 1954–2004 Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta/MALBA, 2004), 353. Noé adds that a number of young people have chosen Ferrari as ‘an example of youthfulness for his natural freedom and constant questioning of all prejudice’.

80 ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984), ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 311.

81 Andrew Graham-Yool ‘Our Father, Who Art in Art’. Index on Censorship 2 (2005), 154.