The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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Néstor García Canclini, the anthropologist, professor, and cultural studies theoretician, interprets León Ferrari’s blue-printed and photocopied works, using the “aura” concept that was proposed by Walter Benjamin. He also underscores the obsessive, asphyxiating nature of Ferrari’s work, and claims that it is prone to “criticism as parody”. García Canclini discusses the work in terms of the state of society, and suggests that art encourages a broader perspective, introducing playfulness and new languages.
León Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires in 1920, the son of Augusto Cesare Ferrari, the Italian artist and architect. The younger Ferrari was a latecomer to the plastic arts, a status which allowed him to function as a link between the generation of artists from the late fifties and the young avant-garde of the sixties. His early works were ceramic sculptures, but in later years he experimented with wire structures, with a visual form of writing, and with collages. There are two distinct themes running through his work: one is a strong condemnation of military dictatorships, American imperialism, and the ideology of the Catholic Church. The other has a more formalistic quality, expressed in a conceptual style and, at times, in the surrealist tradition. His 1965 object-montage, titled Civilización Occidental y Cristiana [Western Christian Civilization], was censured at theCentro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella [the Torcuato Di Tella Institute’s Visual Arts Center] (see documents 743800, 744085, and 761879). It depicts a Christ mounted on a US Air Force bomber that is plunging Earthward. Ferrari was involved in the political conceptualism movement of the seventies (particularly Tucumán Arde, in 1968). In response to the most recent Argentine military dictatorship’s repressive regime (1975-83), he went into exile in Brazil, where he explored a variety of ideas, such as formalism and the reproducibility of a work, as well as the spatial relationship between sculpture and music (see documents 743960, 744392, and 743870, among others). In 1984 his work was once again exhibited in Buenos Aires, where he finally returned and settled. Néstor García Canclini — the Argentine cultural theoretician who lives in Mexico City — published, among many other works, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo [Popular Cultures in Capitalism] (Mexico City: Nueva Imagen, 1982). The text published as the introduction to the exhibition, León Ferrari: planos, heliografías y fotocopias [Floor Plans, Blue prints, and Photo copies] (Mexico City: Museo Carrillo Gil, April, 1982). Cover of the exhibition catalog and checklist.