Ana Longoni

In the late 1970s & early 1980s I subscribed to & regularly read 2 political anti-CIA magazines: Counterspy & C.A.I.B. (Covert Action Information Bulletin). These were AMAZING sources of info regarding the havoc being wreaked on the world by US Covert Operations. They were also almost insufferable to read: full of extreme detail about torture & murder. & Argentina under the coup d'etat in 1976 of the Junta of Commanders in Chief was the WORST. The sheer quantity of people disappeared was phenomenal. Total brutality. How any intelligent sensitive person in Argentina survived this era is beyond me. Many were killed, many fled.

W/ this history behind me, & w/ very little other knowledge about Argentina, I was eager to read about avant-garde culture in the decade preceeding this nightmare, eager to try to get a grip on what was happening there culturally, eager to find out who did what & whether they survived.

As I was reading this, I was often bored - it's academic - & sometimes excited: there are some interesting ideas. Only one of the artists ended up murdered - but, as another one noted, it was mainly the working class being murdered at the time, the artists, regardless of the political nature of their work, were more privileged.

There was a happening that didn't happen - it was created as a media event; there was an investigation into political conditions in a poor province: data gathered to contradict the mass media's propaganda; there were artists burning their work in protest of the police closing an exhibit; there were artists protesting a prize that'd involved censorship; there was a rapid politicization of many of the artists; there were arrests.

In the chronology provided at the end of the bk about Argentinian events from 1945 to 1983, there's mentioned a military coup in 1955, one in 1962, one in 1966, & one in 1976. Reading this bk won't really help you understand all this, but it'll add some interesting details.… (altro)