English

Antiaesthetics

Antiaesthetics was published thanks to the enormous generosity of Frans van Riel, who nevertheless did not want to venture into publishing. Having learnt what I was writing, he said: “I’ll publish it myself. One has to be consistent: in the 1960s, I was in charge of your first big exhibition, and now comes the theory.” Juan Carlos Distéfano, then graphic designer for the Instituto Di Tella, designed the book’s cover and produced its layout. The main idea was to reflect upon creative aesthetics and its confrontation with established aesthetics; this is why its contentions appear controversially as antiaesthetics. This is why my original intention was to call it “Aesthetics of Antiaesthetics.” It was Fernando Maza who suggested simplifying and making the title more explicit. 

This text was based on my conversations with the artists of my group, but also with Kenneth Kemble, with whom we tackled the idea of unity in a work, and also with Luis Camnitzer and Gabriel Morera, with whom I exchanged ideas in New York about the issues raised by panting of broken vision. It is indeed to these last two that the final letter (which ends the book) is addressed. He also acknowledged, in the foreword: “...that I was indebted to two critics and a writer for three theses that I had heard them put forward, but that I had developed myself: to Jorge Romero Brest, on art as search; to Lawrence Alloway, on chaos as structure, formulated in New York facing my work; and to Federico González Frías, on the distinction between art as creation and art as outcome.” In these acknowledgements, I don’t know why I omitted authorship for the term awareness of chaos, which, as I’ve said before, had been previously used about our work by Hugo Parpagnoli.

The book has two parts, each of five chapters. The first, “General Considerations of Art Endeavor,” contains: “1. The Artist: Eternal Child and Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “2. The Artist as Instrument of History,” “3. Aesthetics of Antiaesthetics,” “4. The Work as Flux,” and “5. The Work in Itself and Other Epiphenomena of Artistic Creation.” The second part, “Location of Current Art Endeavors,” contains: “6. Permanent Movement,” “7. The Contemporary Process,” “8. The Current Scenario,” “9. The Nationality of Art”, and “10. Chaos as Structure.” It also has an appendix, “Letter to Luis Camnitzer and Gabriel Morera.”


Prologue

[…] This is a book on painting as artistic endeavor, generally, and in particular, on place and time, and therefore, about its future projections. This is why it is, in a certain way, an introduction to painting, but not from the point of view of contemplation. This is why it may perhaps be good for contemplation. It gives it a new perspective, a new dimension that contemplation by itself lacks, as it lacks anything that is hiding behind the creative will, and which channels it through different expressions.

Do not believe this is the application of a theory that comes before art. It is not, for the simple reason that the creative will is not a clear and strong will, but one that appears, first and foremost, as a way of knowledge, as a pursuit. This pursuit is done at all levels, consciously or not, in life. It does not come before or after the work. It is during a permanent creation. That is why I cannot help thinking. This way of thinking does not make me part of a formula, but merely part of a path within painting.

But, in the apt words of Sartre, every work of art is a social and individual event simultaneously. In some way, painting is a collective creation. This is why communicating my work is not enough. I want to communicate my will of pursuit, which exceeds my individual possibilities of expression. This book is aimed at collective endeavor.

Its starting point is the element that is previous to every work: the subject doing it, he who is called artist. This is why, above all, I discuss general considerations of art endeavor.

A work is not discussed here as an abstract idea, the “work of art,” or as the object of the artist’s will, but as a footprint during a walk, as an epiphenomenon of creation. The artist’s will is aimed at pursuits that exceed the work. The work is just testimony of the pursuit, for it is proposed as within the realm of images.

Because what matters is the flux of creation, and in connection to it the artist is just an instrument of its history, further on I will place art endeavor in this time, and in its demands. These, insensibly, take me to draw up a geographic location of the artist (for he does not only live in a time but in a place) and therefore to venture a reply for a taboo question, that of the nationality of art. It also takes me straight to address another taboo of art: unity. A painting of broken vision, a possible collective work, and the possibility, therefore, of a new organic art, are the consequences.

[…] I consider the problem of rupture of unity from three angles. From the very essence of artistic endeavor, from the process of contemporary painting, and as present and future work.

If beauty was the ancient altar of aesthetics, today we would find, taking its place, what used to be considered the essence of beauty: the unity of a work. It is because of our awareness of the endeavor, and not because of some iconoclastic spirit, that this book is aimed against this holiness of art. Its ultimate point is chaos as new structural foundation.



"Antiestética", Buenos Aires, Ediciones de la Flor [1965] 1988, 2015