The Role of Art Regarding Politics in The Context Of 1968

The Role of Art Regarding Politics in The Context Of 1968 
The year 1968 was a watershed moment in Latin American art owing to the year's revolutionary upsurge of widespread objection against government political parties and a renewed understanding between politics and aesthetics. Latin American artists in Argentina and Brazil developed innovative ways to criticize their governments and ruling classes for ignoring social and political tensions. For instance, the book How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart criticized the prevalence of Western capitalism and cultural imperialism in Latin America. The book, which speaks against the prevalence of Western ideology in third world countries, embodies the same counterrevolution spirit witnessed in 1968 in Argentina and Brazil (Mattelart). This essay will compare and contrast the role of the art regarding politics in the 1968 counterculture in Argentina and Brazil. It argues that although the counterculture artistic spheres in Argentina and Brazil addressed different political and social issues, they were both rooted in an anti-establishment political reading.
While the counterculture art movement in Argentina opposed various government political policies, one of the most prominent issues it addressed was government censorship of artworks deemed as offending the sensibilities of the ruling class. For instance, the four works submitted by the artist Leon Ferrari to the National Prize of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT) were rejected based on being too scandalous and not conforming to the institution's definition of what comprised good works of art. Ferrari's contribution criticized the United States for its military occupation in Vietnam, a political subject that the organizers of the Di Tella exhibition viewed as corrosive and trenchant. The counterculture art movement in Argentina opposed the stricture of creative talent and worked by conservative institutions: the latter tended to dictate the rules to which artists were supposed to adjust to and rejected all works with contrary leanings, irrespective of their merit. Conservative institutions such as the Di Tella exhibitions promoted ideological discrimination in art by censoring all aesthetics that criticized government political policies.
Therefore, the counterculture art movement in Argentina can be understood as a response to the censorship that many artists experienced when showcasing works that spoke to relatable political and social issues. For example, Ferrari argues against art institutions' dictatorial nature in discarding art they considered socially or politically polarizing. Accepting artworks that showed no evident political color is prejudicial and encourages passivity of the citizens in the face of social and political injustice (Katzenstein). This tendency to judge art by its subject matter rather than its inherent artistic value forced many revolutionary artists in Argentina to defy aesthetic conventions and integrate political and social tensions into their artworks. Censorship was a major external obstacle in highlighting the hardships of dictatorship, and therefore many artists adopted an avant-garde model of representing their discontent with oppressive government political parties. The counterculture art movement in Argentina deconstructed and altered classical models of representation favored by conservative art institutions and a generally passive audience to create new affectivities which reinforced their abilities to oppose political and social injustices.
For example, Ferrari’s play Palabras ajenas employed an avant-garde construction of several visual, dramatic, audio, and literary resources, including news clippings and biblical and literary texts, to criticize President Lyndon B. Johnson's decision to invade Vietnam. Ferrari wanted the audience "to see something active, immediate, news about Vietnam from the newspapers" and then find themselves at odds with the notion of Pope Paul VI aiding Johnson in conjunction with Hitler. By associating the unexpected Paul VI with Johnson and the notorious Hitler, the audience is forced to rethink their support of the West, especially their understanding of papal peace in the face of the Vietnam war, and how their passivity compares to Germany’s inaction during Hitler’s tyrannical rule (Katzenstein). Other artists in Argentina's counterculture art movement employed similar unorthodox art forms to oppose political injustices by the government and awaken audiences' conscience to their inaction and hypocrisy. For instance, Oscar Bony ex...