Third Text

21 June 2022

Verónica Tello and Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia
 

A selection of key publications developed by Chilean artists, writers, curators and art workers during the 1970s:
01 Manuscritos, 1975    02 V.I.S.U.A.L., 1976–77    03 Galería Cromo, 1977    04 Instituto chileno norteamericano de cultura, 1979
05 CAL, issue 2, 1979    06 CAL, issue 3, 1979    07–08 CAL, issue 4, 1979

After 1973: el apagón cultural

In Chile, cultural discourse regularly espouses the mythology of el apagón cultural, the cultural blackout precipitated by the 1973 coup led by Augusto Pinochet. ^[1]  This cultural blackout allegedly pervaded Chile during the seventeen-year dictatorship as a consequence of the regime’s censorship. It is often said, for example, that the military regime’s attempts to ‘extirpar el cáncer marxista’ ^[2] (exterminate the cancer of Marxism) led to extreme attacks on Chile’s left, including artists, musicians and academics, especially in the first, most violent decade of the dictatorship. ^[3]  Yet as we, and others, have observed, such a cultural blackout never existed. ^[4]

No doubt, from 11 September 1973, the dictatorship intervened and dismantled spaces, institutions and agents across different parts of Chile that had been sympathisers of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), the political party led by Salvador Allende, who had been ousted in the coup led by Pinochet. Much of the street muralism generated during Allende’s time as President of Chile (1970–1973) was ‘whitewashed’; further, Pinochet’s military raided the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development III building in Santiago, burning some artworks, painting over others and, in some cases, looting them. ^[5]  The state publishing house, Quimantú, was raided and renamed Gabriela Mistral (after the iconic Chilean poet who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945), and then recalibrated to disseminate publications promoting a hopeful image of the military junta. The Faculty of Arts of the Universidad de Chile was closed immediately, while the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) suffered from constant political persecution, and was forced to close its Escuela Latinoamericana de Sociología and Escuela de Ciencias Políticas y Administración Pública, before the dictatorship terminated its agreement and retracted their legal personality in 1978, and thus its capacity to operate. ^[6]  These, and other measures, became common during the civic-military dictatorship.

Despite this disastrous panorama, a series of counter-strategies were initiated to activate the cultural field in Santiago de Chile across higher education, cultural production and the media. Innovative university programmes, such as the Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos (DEH) at the Universidad de Chile formed an alliance with the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, becoming a vital and prolific space for the study of literature, arts, philosophy and social sciences. With the DEH’s newfound – if not also unlikely – academic affiliation with the sciences, its activities and programmes could be developed, and thrive, without major disruption. Among its faculty were leading philosophers and art critics Ronald Kay, Enrique Lihn and Nicanor Parra, and its students included Raúl Zurita, Diamela Eltit, Patricio Marchant and María Eugenia Brito, who would all become deeply influential artists and writers over the course of the dictatorship and beyond. ^[7]

Other spaces for the study and practice of the arts also propagated. Taller de Artes Visuales was founded by Francisco Brugnoli and Virginia Errazuriz after they were expelled from the Faculty of Arts  at the Universidad de Chile for sympathising with the Communist Party. CENECA (Centro de Indagación y Experimentación Artística), a leading research centre that specialised in the production of critical thought and reflection during the military dictatorship, was founded in 1976, producing and disseminating literature, radio, television, theatre and visual art. ^[8]  CENECA was mainly made up of academics who had been expelled from universities and from other institutes such as FLACSO.

Out of the aforementioned education and research institutes emerged a large movement of students, from the Agrupación Cultural Universitaria (ACU), ^[9] la Unión Nacional por la Cultura (National Union for Culture), and the Jóvenes Artistas Plásticos (Young Plastic Artists). These groups – all of which became hugely influential – collectively developed cultural strategies (muralism, art salons or seminars) to confront the coup d'état, and ensured that resistance unfolded beyond the academy, supporting experimental media art and discourse.

Beyond universities and research institutions, binational institutes also supported the work of both teachers and students, and other cultural workers, during the dictatorship. The Chilean-American Institute of Culture, for example, hosted the renowned Seminar on Contemporary Art led by the influential French/Chilean essayist and cultural theorist Nelly Richard, while the Chilean-French Institute hosted the significant Franco-Chilean Festival of Video Art from 1981 to 1990. ^[10]  Alternative publications, available via kiosks, such as La Bicicleta, Fortín Mapocho, CAUCE, APSI and HOY published critical writing on contemporary art. At times, Catholic magazines such as Mensaje, or adult magazines such as Bravo, included critical notes and reflections on the dictatorship by cultural theorists and intellectuals.

In short, a cultural blackout never existed in Santiago de Chile after 1973. Even from a contemporary perspective, the complex socio-historical context of the military dictatorship era – during which neoliberalism was installed in Chile – saw a profound proliferation of spaces, platforms and media. As such, in the years after 1973, culture and the arts took a leading role in society in Santiago.

The Proliferation of Art Criticism in Santiago de Chile
 

Some of the key publications developed by Chilean artists, writers, curators and art workers during the 1980s:
01 Nelly Richard, Una mirada sobre el arte en Chile, photocopied and self-produced book, 1981   02 One of the four issues of the La Separata broadsheet, 1981–83   03 Arte y Textos No 11, December 1983   04 Nelly Richard, Arte in Chile desde 1973: Escena de avanzada y socieded, seminar paper, FLACSO, 1986
 

We want to particularly focus here on how, after 1973, art criticism dedicated to critical conceptual art forms in Santiago proliferated. The privatisation of culture and all aspects of public life in Chile after 1977, along with Pinochet’s collaborations with the Chicago Boys, ^[11] ensured that arts publishing was deeply precarious, subjected to censorship, diminished public funding and weakened infrastructural support. ^[12] Nonetheless, art criticism managed to find a cultural life via self-published, DIY and xeroxed publications, which often circulated in tiny numbers (around 50 to 200 copies), distributed by their authors, editors or publishers (usually small art galleries). These publications only reached the authors’ or editors’ circle of friends and/or audiences connected to publishers, yet in this way art criticism persisted throughout the community, in spite of the dictatorship and its various techniques for controlling the population. ^[13]  Experimental galleries, such as Época, Sur, Cromo and CAL y VISUALA, located in the centres of Santiago and Providencia, functioned as the main platforms for the circulation of the experimental and avant-garde proposals of Chilean and Latin American art.

While the story we have just told is fairly well known – at least within Chile – less known is how art criticism proliferated outside Pinochet’s frontiers via the support of international presses, in particular the Australian art journal Art & Text. ^[14]

The Contribution of Art & Text to the Chilean Cultural Field
 

Art & Text’s collaborations with Chilean art workers, 1981–1987: 
01 Issue 4, 1981   02 Issue 8, ‘What is the Use of Intellectuals? Pool-side issue’, 1982–83   03 Issue 9, 1983   04 Issue 12/13, 1983
05 Issue 15, special issue, ‘Double Trouble’, in collaboration with ZG (no 11), 1984   06 Issue 16, ‘Burnout’, 1984
07 Issue 21, 1986, featuring Nelly Richard’s Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 essay   08 Issue 23/4, 1987

In Australia, Art & Text is remembered for its translations of French post-structuralism, introducing the work of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes and Michel Serres to Australian readers. ^[15]  Yet for a period of almost a decade (1981–1990), with the support of both of the journal’s editors, Paul Taylor and Paul Foss, Art & Text collaborated with Chilean arts workers, who were also invested in French post-structuralism from an antipodean perspective. ^[16]  While this history of South-South collaboration on the production and trans-Pacific dissemination of Chilean art criticism during the Pinochet dictatorship has been briefly discussed in histories of Art & Text, ^[17] it remains mostly elusive.

As we have documented in another essay recently published in Third Text, ^[18] Art & Text’s collaborations with Chilean art critics were spurred on by one figure: the renowned Chilean-Australian artist Juan Dávila. Dávila left Santiago de Chile in 1974 to live in Melbourne, Australia, but maintained regular correspondence with key members of the Chilean art scene, including Nelly Richard, Dávila’s closest confidante.

At this point it is worth noting that, via Dávila, Art & Text was aligned not just with Chilean art workers, but more specifically with the group that essayist and cultural critic Nelly Richard dubbed the escena de avanzada (advanced scene). As the Chilean sociologist of art Tomas Peters Nuñez argues, Richard first used the term escena de avanzada in her 1981 texts ‘Postulación de un margen de escritura crítica’ and ‘Una mirada sobre el arte en Chile’. ^[19] There she posits that artists such as Eugenio Dittborn, Carlos Leppe, Lotty Rosendfeld, Diamela Eltit and the art collective CADA, were, like her, working with cryptic and endogamous language as an aesthetic and political strategy. As Richard would later properly articulate in the pages of Art & Text (issue 21, 1986) such language was used because, under the duress of surveillance, artists and writers wished to mount a critique of the dictatorship through often highly distorted and/or illegible visual and textual codes, evading censorship and the consequences of being detected. ^[20]  At the same time, they also refused to engage with the populist pictorial and linguistic rhetoric deployed by leftist muralists and artists that leaned towards propaganda. Instead, they shaped highly agile yet dense aesthetics that required readers to furiously decode meanings and parse heterogenous references using the tools of French post-structuralism and semiology (and to a lesser extent the Frankfurt school). ^[21]  The (French) theoretical foundations of the escena de avanzada were clearly deeply aligned with those of Art & Text, even if on many levels the socio-political contexts of the two ‘scenes’ had little in common.

With the support of Art & Text’s editors, first Taylor and then Foss, Dávila initiated a collaboration with Chilean arts workers that lasted for almost a decade (1981–1990) during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990). ^[22]  Dávila, or as he is better known in Chile, Juan Domingo Dávila, made friends with Taylor in 1981, at the germinal stages of the magazine, ^[23] and befriended the journal’s subsequent editor, Paul Foss, as Taylor was preparing to leave for New York in 1984. ^[24]  In an act of solidarity, Dávila worked with Taylor and Foss to disseminate the work of Richard in particular, but he also helped to solicit the input of other Chilean cultural workers, including the philosopher Patricio Marchant and the designer/publisher Francisco Zegers. Essays, interviews and artist’s pages by Dávila, Richard and, to a lesser extent, Marchant appeared in issues 4, 8, 9, 12/13, 15, 16, 21 and 23/24 of Art & Text. Issue 21 was wholly dedicated to Richard’s writing, culminating in the special issue-cum-monograph Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (1986). Margins and Institutions was published as a bilingual special issue translated by Dávila and Foss, designed by Foss with the support of Zegers, ^[25] and ostensibly commissioned by Taylor. ^[26]

In 1985, Dávila and Foss initiated the Art & Criticism Monograph Series, which published as its first book The Mutilated Pietà (1985), a monograph on Dávila’s appropriations of Michelangelo’s Pietà (1499), featuring a long essay by Foss. While it is well known that Dávila and Foss went on to produce another three English-language books in the series, including Danielle Duval’s Pages from Maria Kozic’s Book (1987) (Duval being a pseudonym of Dávila and Foss), ^[27] it is barely known that in collaboration with Zegers they also published two Spanish-language books in the series, for circulation in Santiago: La estratificación de los márgenes (1989), by Richard, and El fulgor de lo obsceno (1989), which focused on the paintings of Dávila and contained essays by Richard, the Peruvian art critic Gustavo Buntix and the Chilean art historian Carlos Pérez Villalobos. It is worth noting that while these two Spanish-language books were published as part of the series, they were commissioned by Dávila alone; Foss was, in fact, unaware of their existence until we sent him a draft of this essay. ^[28]  Since Dávila funded the Art & Criticism Monograph Series, he clearly took some liberties when it came to selecting which publications were commissioned. ^[29]

In 1990, when the dictatorship ended and the media, along with other institutions, was democratised, the Art & Criticism Monograph Series (and more precisely, Dávila) supported and funded Richard to publish the first seven editions of the influential Santiago-based magazine Revista de Crítica Cultural. Further, while not officially part of the Art & Text imprint, in 1984 Taylor edited Hysterical Tears, the first monograph on Dávila’s art, which included an introduction by Taylor, an essay by Richard and an interview between Dávila and Foss. This list of publications reveals the extent and duration of Dávila’s collaborations with Chilean art workers both during and immediately after the dictatorship, and the extent to which they were sustained by both the structures of Art & Text and the Art & Criticism Monograph Series, and by the (intermittent) support of Taylor and Foss.

Southern Atlas

Today, Art & Text and its affiliated publications are difficult to locate, in part because issues of the journal were not digitised before 1992, and because its holdings in university libraries are in decline. ^[30]  In an attempt to animate Art & Text’s historical, and fading, relations with Chilean art criticism during the military dictatorship, and contest the mythology of the cultural blackout, we have constructed an atlas (see below to download). On the one hand, this atlas acts as an archive, gathering all the publications that Art & Text produced in collaboration with Chilean art workers, and offering short annotations and interpretations of critical positions on topics spanning migratory embodiment, colonialism, the centre-periphery binary, and both hegemonic and radical internationalism; on the other hand, the atlas also maps the correlative DIY publications that circulated in Santiago de Chile within the local art scene published by local research institutes and galleries (VISUALA, Sur, FLACSO).

Through the atlas, the differences and resonances between the internal–local and the external–international critical production of art criticism during the dictatorship become apparent for the first time. It is also possible to trace the extent to which ideas were developed in one location that then shifted under the process of translation, along with the extent to which the two poles of the South held common preoccupations with concepts of marginality, albeit experienced through distinct socio-historical contexts. No doubt, the flows and incommensurabilities of art criticism between the two southern locations are bound to Dávila, whose own investment in constructing a critical migratory position that is both/neither Chilean and Australian, and Latin American and Western, is palpable. The atlas reveals how Dávila, with Art & Text and the avanzada (especially Richard), were able to create a critical transnational infrastructure for art criticism capable of exceeding the violence of national borders and hegemonic epistemologies.
 

^[1]    See Claudio Lagos Olivero, Cine chileno en el Santiago del Apagón cultural (1980–1989), Finis Terrae, Santiago, 2013; Pablo Marín, ‘Música, cine y protestas: los años del apagón cultural’, La Tercera, Santiago, 1 July 2019; Paula Thorrington Cronovich, ‘Out of the Blackout and into the Light: How the Arts Survived Pinochet’s Dictatorship’, Iberoamericana, Vol 13, No 51, 2013, pp 119–138

^[2]    This is a common phrase used during the dictatorship by the Military Junta; see Manuel Délano, ‘El “Caso Pinochet”: Fallece en Chile el general que ordenó el ataque a La Moneda’, El Pais, 29 September 1999, accessed 20 December 2021

^[3]    See Karen Donozo Fritz, ‘El “Apagón cultural” en Chile: políticas culturales y censura en la dictadura de Pinochet 1973–1983’, Outros Tempo, Vol 10, No 16, 2013

^[4]    See Sonia Quintana, ‘Plástica’, in Resumen de 6 años de actividad artística en Chile 1974–1979, Departamento de Extensión Cultural del Ministerio de Educación, Santiago, 1979, pp 4–22; and Eduardo Yentzen, ed, ‘Presencia de la actividad artística chilena en las diversas revistas de difusión masiva’, in Revista La Bicicleta, número 2, Santiago, 1978, pp 2–7

^[5]    This building was one of the most internationally recognised emblems of the Popular Unity project. Its construction was carried out in record time, thanks to the commitment of the workers and the professionals involved. The building integrated works of art under a decorative as well as integral conception – for example, requesting that artists take charge of the lighting, the door handles, and even the fireplace. Another of its characteristic elements was the incorporation of a soup kitchen especially for the workers, to provide a healthy diet at low cost.

^[6]    In Chile, for an institution, foundation or organisation to function, they must be approved by economic organisations (Servisio de Impuestos Internos) and also by state agencies that grant them a legal personality. In this case, Pinochet took advantage and did not renew their permit, therefore the institution did not have a legal backing, and so did not exist as an agency and could not pay taxes, fees, or have a physical address, etc.

^[7]    See Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia, ‘Estrategias, análisis y graficaciones de la imagen en Dittborn y Kay (1976–1981) I’, LUR, 2 December 2020

^[8]    See Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia, ed, ‘CENECA: estudios para una transformación cultural‘, Écfrasis ediciones, Santiago, 2020

^[9]    See Claudio Ogass, ed, Archivo de la Agrupación Cultural Universitaria, Archivo FECH, Santiago, 2022

^[10]  For a recent analysis of the significance of the Chilean-French Institute for the Santiago art community during the dictatorship, see www.cultura.gob.cl/seminariovideoarte/

^[11]  See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin, London, 2008

^[12]  See Nelly Richard, ‘Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973’, Juan Dávila and Paul Foss, trans, Art & Text 21, 1986

^[13]  See Lucia Vodanovic, ‘Reception and Contingency in Recent Art from Chile’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol 23, No 3, 2014, accessed 11 September 2021

^[14]  While other art journals had on occasion published the writings of Chilean art critics (for example, Domus in 1981, Art Press in 1982, and Third Text in 1987), no journal did so to the extent of Art & Text. For details, see Verónica Tello and Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia, ‘A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila’s collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean art workers during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1981–1990’, Third Text, Vol 35, No 6, December 2021

^[15]  See Heather Barker and Charles Green, ‘No More Provincialism: Art & Text’, emaj, Vol 1, No 5, 2010, pp 1–30, p 4, accessed 18 February 2021; Paul Foss, Rob McKenzie with Ross Chambers, Rex Butler and Simon Rees, The &-Files: Art & Text 1981–2002, IMA/Whale & Star, Brisbane and Culver City, California, 2009; Helen Hughes and Nicholas Croggon, eds, Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981–1984, Surpllus/MUMA, Melbourne, 2013

^[16]  This collaboration is briefly discussed in Juan Dávila and Janine Burke, ‘Reacting with Enthusiasm’, in Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981–1984, op cit, p 246

^[17]  Ibid

^[18]  Tello and Valenzuela-Valdivia, ‘A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila’s collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean art workers during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1981–1990’, op cit

^[19]  See Tomas Peters Nuñez, ‘Nelly Richard’s critica cultural: theoretical debates and politico-aesthetic explorations in Chile (1970–2015)’, PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2016

^[20]  See Richard, ‘Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973’, op cit, p 16

^[21]  See Peters Nuñez, op cit, 2016

^[22]  It is important to note that while Taylor and Foss supported Dávila, especially in 1981–1986, Dávila was driving the collaborations with Chilean art workers, especially in the period 1987–1990; by this latter stage he was publishing the work of Chilean art workers (namely Richard) via the Art & Criticism Monograph Series without the knowledge of Foss, as we will detail

^[23]  Juan Dávila, in conversation with Verónica Tello, 10 September 2019

^[24]  As Paul Foss recounts, Paul Taylor ‘set up’ the friendship between Dávila and Foss: Taylor ‘told Juan that I was going to be at a St Kilda nightclub on a certain night & Juan went there & sought me out’ (Paul Foss, email correspondence with Verónica Tello, 11 July 2020)

^[25]  The roles played by Zegers, Foss and Dávila are recounted in the ‘Acknowledgement’ section of ‘Margins and Institutions’, pp 5–6. There it states: ‘The present book owes a considerable debt to Francisco Zegers for his work in editing, designing and assisting with the photography in Santiago’ (Louise Dauth, p 5). Dauth was director of the Experimental Art Foundation, which hosted the exhibition ‘Art in Chile: Margins and Institutions: An Audiovisual Documentation’ in 1986, co-curated by Juan Dávila and Nelly Richard to coincide with the launch of the Art & Text special issue. In personal correspondence to Dauth dated 28 October 1985, Dávila stated: ‘We are working with Zegers in the design and in collecting the photographic documents that will go with it [Margins and Institutions], really an archaeological task! I hope to return with the design ready and all the photos ready to print and also with the Spanish appendix in a floppy disc’ (Archives of the Experimental Art Foundation). Recently, Foss has clarified that Zegers’ role was to provide the imagery and the Spanish-language copy for the special issue, which supported his design of the bilingual issue overall. Foss states: ‘there were production problems and the issue almost never saw the light of day’ (Paul Foss, email correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021).

^[26]  There are multiple, conflicting accounts to wade through regarding how and why Margins and Institutions became a special issue of Art & Text entirely dedicated to Richard. In Impresario, Dávila recounts: ‘In typical Paul Taylor fashion, we were in a sports car at high speed with Nelly. He [Taylor] decided that he’d give the whole issue to an essay by Nelly Richard on an “avant-garde” movement at end of the world’ (Juan Dávila and Janine Burke, ‘Reacting with Enthusiasm’, Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981–1984, op cit, p 246). Taylor met Richard while she was in Australia for the 1984 Biennale of Sydney, for which she was the Chilean Commissioner. In personal correspondence, Dávila has further stated: ‘Paul Taylor accepted the idea to publish Margins and Institutions… A bit reluctant, but after all he did it. [By 1986] Paul Foss had come into the magazine, and he was very committed [to the special issue]. We spent 6 to 8 months translating Nelly Richard’s essay without pay. Both Taylor and Foss supported and printed articles that were not mainstream, or Western’ (Juan Dávila, email correspondence with Veronica Tello, 27 June 2020). Denise Robinson (a contemporary of Paul Taylor) recounts: ‘The publication, written by the Chilean theorist and critic Nelly Richard, was commissioned by Paul Taylor and edited and translated by Paul Foss and Juan Davila. It may have been published in 1986, however, the impetus for, and the work to realise it, accrued over a period of several years in both Australia and Chile’ (Denise Robinson, ‘Everyone gets Lights’, Impresario: Paul Taylor, The Melbourne Years, 1981–1984, op cit, p 272). Despite Dávila and Robinson’s accounts, Paul Foss has said that ‘Paul Taylor was not involved in any aspect of the planning and publication of Margins and Institutions, though he did insist his name be included as one of the editors’ (Paul Foss, correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021).

^[27]  ‘The Danielle Duval pseudonym was an invention of Paul Foss’ (Paul Foss, correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021); the other two books were Eric Michael, For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrurla Makes TV at Yuendumu (1987) and Allen S Weiss, Iconology and Perversion (1988)

^[28]  Foss, correspondence with Verónica Tello, 29 July 2021

^[29]  According to Foss, Eric Michaels also funded parts of the Art & Criticism Monograph Series (ibid)

^[30]  See Tello and Valenzuela-Valdivia, ‘A Partial History of South–South Art Criticism: Juan Dávila’s collaborations with Art & Text and Chilean art workers during the Pinochet dictatorship, 1981–1990’, op cit

Verónica Tello is a Chilean-Australian art historian based at UNSW Art & Design in Sydney. Her work is dedicated to engaging and animating queer and diasporic archives in/across Australia and Chile. She is currently finalising, with Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia, a manuscript on the exhibition history of 'Art in Chile: An Audio-Visual Documentation' (1986, co-curated by Juan Dávila and Nelly Richard) and the accompanying catalogue/book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973.

Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia is a researcher and curator. He is Head of Debate and Thought at the Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile, and founding Director of ECFRASIS, a research institute and press focused on Latin American art histories. His book, Del cuerpo al Archivo: Foto, video y libro-performance en Chile (1973–1990), was recently published with Metales Pesados. He was Researcher at the Digital Archive Project at International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (2019–2020), and at the Centro de Documentación de Artes Visuales in Santiago (2014–2018).