Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how the historiographic categorisation of Chilean and Argentine artists who worked with the body under the term ‘Conceptualism’ contributed to overshadow the work of more peripheral artists whose approach of the body raises just as valid political and ethical stakes.

Paper long abstract:

The emergence of Happenings on the Argentine artistic scene of the 1960s and of performance art in the 1970s Chilean avant-garde illustrate the advent of practices positing the dematerialisation of the art object as a necessary condition to articulate a political critique of the military regimes in place at the time. Using the artist's body as raw material, zone of mediation and conceptual tool to perturb official discourses, these works articulated an aesthetics of precariousness that became a recognisable feature of avant-garde movements in the region and one subsequently centralised under the banner of Conceptualism.

This paper bears testimony to the saliency of such practices and engages with the precariousness of the body as a valid strategy to articulate political and ethical modes of dissent in the Southern Cone. However, it also seeks to reveal how historiographic leanings toward periodicity contributed to overshadow the work of artists working on the margins of Conceptualism. Engaging with George Bataille's discourse on the Informe as "a term that serves to bring things down in the world", this paper examines the production of Chilean painter Roser Bru and Argentine sculptress Lydia Galego whose works consider the body not so much as a conceptual given but as a zone of shifting surfaces on the perpetual brink of collapse. As such, it argues that these artists' rejection of fixed forms puts in crisis not only established discourses on the avant-garde and the body but also historiographic attempts to unify Latin American artistic practices into linear and coherent narratives.