Viva El Juego: Play in Latin American Performance Art (original) (raw)

2022, Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives

Sociologists and educators have long known that playing is essential to learning and building moral character. As early as the 1950’s Latin American artists began challenging the relevance of the formalized modern art world with informal art presentations that sought to upend the status quo. Moreover, they contested canonical means of making and reading artwork. One unifying theme amongst many diverse Latin American contemporary visual artists was the desire to break with the rigidity of art institutions and its prescribed roles for the creators and viewers of art. It is within this context of rejecting formalism and product-focused art that a new form of experiential performance art emerges. In this chapter I consider events from 1965 through 1992 created by Latin American artists that use body-based artwork and/or exhibitions that directly engage spectators. Within this genre, one can see a game unfold as an inversion or redefinition of reality, as an established or implied set of rules that spectators engage with, as an invitation to fun and pleasure, as a reclamation of leisure time in response to capitalist repression, and as a critical hoax. I draw from Catherine Homan’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Will to Power as Art” wherein she explains that the spectator not only participates in the art experience but in the formation of the artist and of art as life. I read this alongside the Marxist notions of commodity fetishism to argue that Latin American performance art as play significantly disrupted the art market’s expressions of value by transforming spectator participation and prioritizing experimentation, humor, sensuality, and playfulness as intangible and radical anti-capitalist acts. Marta Minujín and Ruben Santantonín’s Menesunda invited spectators to play in an adult-sized funhouse. Lygia Clark’s Baba Antropofagica likewise made use of objects only to entice spectators to become participants in full-bodied engagement as ritual. Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés evoked pleasure and jubilance through dance. Art collectives, Arte de los Medios and Asco, created ‘fake news’ to make social critiques of media-inflated art events and the erasure of Latino culture in Hollywood respectively. By closely analyzing the performance documentation and scholarship around key Latin American performance art events, I place these diverse works in conversation with one another, demonstrating how games and trickery shift social consciousness by requiring social participation. I argue that techniques of play perform critical operations outside of the dominant social narratives about labor generated by capitalist and communist agendas. Engaging spectators with play, Latin American performance artists promoted leisure and creativity over labor and marketability. In doing so, they emphasized experimentation and somatic awareness to expand the definition of art, to reject the superficial valuation of art objects, and to democratize the aesthetic experience.