HISTORY CONTEMP ART paper

Thinking the Exhibition:

Writing, Curating, Making

WEEK TWO: THINKING

- Hannah Arendt: “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971)

- Thinking and Dictatorship: “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1962)

- Argentina: Avant-Garde and Dictatorship (1960s)

- Oscar Masotta: “I Committed a Happening,” (1966)

HANNAH ARENDT

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a Jewish philosopher and political theorist, who was forced to leave her native Germany in 1933, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1941. Arendt best known books are: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, and The Human Condition (1958), a philosophical study of labor, work and action. Arendt also published many influential essays on the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the time of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties thinking, willing, and judging.

Adolf Eichmann. Trial in Jerusalem, 1962

• Adolf Eichmann (1906-1962) was a German high official who was hanged by the State of Israel for his part in the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. In January 1942, at a lakefront villa in the Wannsee District of Berlin, a conference of Nazi high officials was convened to organize the logistics of what the Nazis called the “final solution to the Jewish questions.” Eichmann was to coordinate the details; thus, although it was not yet generally known that the “final solution” was mass extinction, Eichmann had in effect been named the chief executioner. Thereupon he organized the identification, assembly and transportation of Jews from all over Europe to their final destinations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps in German-occupied Poland. On trial in Jerusalem, for crimes against humanity, he maintained his innocence by claiming “he was just following orders.”

Andrea Geyer: “Criminal Case 40/61:Reverb,” UAG, 2010.

Hannah Arendt: “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 1971

In our context…the distinction between knowing and thinking is crucial. If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant, how intelligent or stupid he may prove to be.

The inability to think, therefore, is not stupidity; [the inability to think] can be found in highly intelligent people, and wickedness is hardly its cause, if only because thoughtfulness as well as stupidity are much more frequent phenomenon than wickedness.

The ability to think, therefore, is the ability to NOT be distracted by the world around us. This is why thinking is so hard. It’s not because of one’s so-called “aptitude,” its because being actively focused on something–figuring something out—that is beyond our immediate world is very challenging.

Roberto Jacoby, Total Participation Happening, 1966

OSCAR MASOTTA

In 1967, Oscar Masotta (1930 – 1979) was an Argentine intellectual and artist, who edited the book Happenings (1967). The publication juxtaposed two art genres within the Argentine avant- garde of the 1960s. On the one hand there was the “old” concept of the Happening and its specific realizations in Buenos Aires, which was dubbed by Allan Kaprow as the “city of Happenistas” in 1966. On the other hand, Masotta presented a new genre of Anti-Happening, realized by the Art of the Mass Media Group. This group sought to find its sole reality in mass media circuits, dissolving it into social life of its own.

Masotta was known for his unique combination of Avant-garde aesthetics, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Sartrean politics

Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT), Buenos

Aires, 1960s

Masotta’s essay “After Pop We Dematerialize” (1967) uniquely combined theories from: El Lissitzsky, For the Voice, 1923 with

Vladimir Mayakovsky; Jean-Paul Sarte, Situations, 1948; Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the art object, 1966 – 1972.

General Juan Carlos Ongania’s, La Noche de los Bastones Largos (The

Night of the Long Sticks), military raid on University of Buenos Aires, 1966

Argentine Soldiers train their submachine guns toward the government House, Casa Rosada, in Buenos Aires, on June 28, 1966, as ousted President Arturo Illia left the Building. An overnight coup by the Military overthrew the administration of the 65-year-old President.

Oscar Masotta: “I Committed a Happening,” 1967

Masotta was disinterested in “conventional” political art, in any “realist” sense. His performative phrase “I committed a happening” thus denoted his “crime” of aesthetically trespassing the Left’s political gatekeepers. For the Left, realism was the ONLY politically committed strategy against fascism. Happenings, on the other hand, were deemed escapist, at best, complicit, at worst.

Masotta countered that the choice between Happenings or Realism was false; accordingly he produced conceptual art under dictatorship as a critique of BOTH the Left and Right’s political assumptions about culture.

When challenged by his friends on the Left about the political content of his Happening “To Induce the Spirit of the Image,” Masotta replied: “My Happening…was nothing other than ‘an act of social sadism made explicit.’”

Le Monte Young: The Theatre of Eternal Music, NYC, 1966

Oscar Masotta, Para inducer al espíritu de la imagen (To Induce the Spirit of the Image), Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1966.