Dictatorial Discourse vs. The New and Ungrounded:
The Escena Avanzada and CADA
Spring 2000
When Salvador Allende’s Government of Popular Unity was overthrown by a military coup in 1973, artistic production, and even public life, seemed to suffer a state of paralysis. Repressive government practices fractured public performance and communicative exchange. While political theater and visual art did not disappear all together, for the most part it ran the risk of being complicit with the dictatorship by being representative of "official" culture or it survived "underground" as committed art which opposed the government and sought to restore the socialist project of the preceding regime. By 1977, however, a new group of artists — later referred to as the escena avanzada — began to experiment with recreating art and community. This new, critically informed movement sought a space outside the traditional positions of political discourse. In general, avanzada production sought to question the practices and institutions of all politics and reconceive art as a necessary social practice that eradicated the traditional distance between the artist and the spectator.
One of the most important contributors to the production of the escena avanzada was the collective group CADA — the Art Actions Collective. This group originally consisted of five members who came from different artistic backgrounds and formations. While not specifically a theater or performance group, CADA incorporated strategies of theatricality and performance as an essential element to all of its works. For several years, CADA’s works aggressively asserted themselves in the public sphere, freeing art from the confines of the theater or museum and founding a spontaneous and necessary practice of spectatorship. CADA produced two performances that have received a certain amount of critical attention. The first "art action" called Para no morir de hambre en el arte, 1979 (Not to Die of Hunger in Art) addressed the problem of hunger and poverty, endowing milk with the symbolic power to represent this unrepresentable political issue. The performance consisted of passing out powered milk to people in Santiago’s slums, parading milk trucks through the city’s streets, calling attention to the performance with full-page ads in periodicals, enacting the group’s message in front of the local United Nations building and altering the façade of city’s museum to draw it into the theme of the performance. Later, CADA enacted ¡Ay, Sudamérica! (1981), in which the group dropped flyers onto the city streets from an airplane. The flyers contained a message that simultaneously upheld each person’s right to a decent standard of living and proposed that the general public was capable of instating an entirely new concept of art — one that could overcome traditional, elite boundaries and become part of public life. The group staged other performances similar to these, and all of the collective’s participants produced other individual or collaborative pieces that provoked the public in ways similar to the works mentioned above. In addition, participants in CADA established several self-financed journals to explore the theoretical questions behind avanzada art, such as Visual, Manuscritos, Cal, Ruptura and Cuadernos de/para el analisis, among others. The period’s most notable commentator is Nelly Richard, who continues to comment on contemporary issues that recall similar theoretical concerns of the avanzada in the journal Revista de Crítica Cultural.
The list below presents a preliminary bibliography that discusses the work of CADA and the escena avanzada, as well as information about the Chilean context or general theoretical concerns. Also, for a detailed consideration of many of the issues that surrounded the avanzada artists, see the journals listed in the synopsis offered above.
By Kevin Donnelly
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Preliminary Bibliography
Aguilo, Osvaldo. Plástica Neovanguardista: Antecedentes y Contexto. Santiago:Ediciones Seneca, 1983.
Avelar, Idelber. The Untimely Present. Durham and London: Duke University Press,1999.
Bercht, Fátima (ed). Contemporary Art from Chile. New York: Americas Society,1991.
Brunner, José Joaquin. La cultura autoritaria en Chile. Santiago: FLACSO, 1981.
________. Un espejo trizado: ensayos sobre culturas y políticas culturales. Santiago: FLACSO, 1988.
Buntinx, Gustavo, Carlos Pérez and Nelly Richard. El fulgo de lo obsceno. Santiago: Franciso Zegers, n.d.
Eltit, Diamela. "Sobre las Acciones de Arte: Un Nueva Espacio Crítico" in Umbral, 1980.
________. "Socavada de Sed" in Ruptura, 1982.
Eltit, Diamela and Virginia Paz Errázruriz. El infarto del alma. Santiago: Francisco Zegers, 1994.
Franco, Jean. "Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private," in George Yúdice, Jean Franco and Juan Flores (eds) On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Lechner, Norbert and Susana Levy. El disciplinamiento de la mujer. Santiago:FLACSO, 1984.
Oyarzún, Pablo. "Arte en Chile de veinte, treinta años." Georgia Series on Hispanic Thought, 22-25 (1987-88): 291-324.
Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Rosenfeld, Lotty. "Operations (Work in Progress) Chile-England," in Coco Fusco (ed.) Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, Routledge: New York, 2000.
Richard, Nelly. "Margins and Instituions: Performance of the Chilean Avanzada," inCoco Fusco (ed.), Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas, Routledge: New York, 2000.
________. Residuos y metáforas. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998.
________. La insubordinación de los signos: cambio político, transformanción culturales y poéticas de la crisis. Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1994.
________. Margins and Instituions: Art in Chile Since 1973. Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986.
The following web sites contain recent information about the escena avanzada or works by the avanzada artists today:
www.quepasa.cl/revista/1406/2.shtml
www.adelaide.net.au/~gag/davila/davila2.shtml
www.uol.com.br/23bienial/paises/ipel.htm