“Ars política,” an essay by Argentinean critic Marta Traba (1923–83) who lived in Colombia, is largely a reflection on the history of Venezuelan art in relation to politics. It provides an understanding of how Tecla Tofano (1927–95) defied the aesthetic and ethical conceptions operative in the art establishment in the late fifties and early sixties. This text provides access to the production of an important socially committed artist from Venezuela.
Tofano received a degree from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas de Caracas in 1958. Her early work in ceramics was in keeping with the style of traditional applied arts. In the early sixties, she began making small-format clay sculptures that challenged the values of art institutions. Indeed, this shift in Tofano’s work is the focus of Traba’s essay.
Whereas the work of Tofano’s extraordinary fellow ceramicists like “Cristina Merchán, the Palacios, the Zielkes, María Luisa de Tovar, Eduardo Gregorio, and Reyna Herrera”—most of whom studied with Miguel Arroyo—entailed the production of “sublime” useful or decorative objects, in Tofano’s work the intention “to speak” takes precedence over “the innocence of molding,” Traba argues. The ugly, the baroque, the motley, and the asymmetric are key to these works by Tofano. Furthermore, Traba asserts that Tofano questions “the arbitrariness, atrocities, and fatigue of consumer society and fashion” to build a system of meaning more concerned with sociopolitical issues than with ornamentation.
This text, as opposed to most of Traba’s writing, does not provide a “polemic” interpretation of Tofano’s work, but attests to Traba’s sympathy with the artist: Traba appears to identify with her ideological positions insofar as both envision art as a cultural product that exhibits political and social contradictions.
Like Traba’s writings, each of Tofano’s works openly questions the ideology of power. The artist chose to show her work in non-commercial venues such as Viva México and Aztlán (both located in Caracas); she almost never exhibited in museums. This refusal illustrates the artist’s deep awareness of the audience she was addressing—mainly, those who, like Traba, shared her ideas and sociopolitical commitments, and had the “ability” to understand art as a social sign rather than as a “social act.”
Lo que comen los que comen, the show reviewed by Traba in this text, opened at Galería Viva México on March 9, 1973.