The artist Daniel González (b. 1934) was part of the group, the publications, and the exhibitions that defined the radical mood of the 1960s. El Techo de la Ballena was an art and literary group that was started in Caracas in 1961, a time of great political, economic, and social unrest as a result of the overthrow of the dictator General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–58) and the election of President Rómulo Betancourt (1959–64). The Betancourt government frustrated the country’s democratic aspirations, maintained a precarious stability by means of political persecution, declared the communist party to be illegal, and subjected the people to a policy of harsh repression; Betancourt facilitated the OAS’s support for the Cuban blockade. The Ballena group staged provocative exhibitions that clashed with traditional aesthetic tastes and bourgeois political leanings; it also produced politically committed publications full of poems, essays, and photographs. González was a member of the Ballena group and was part of the art trends downstream from Informalism, which rejected rationalism and the blind faith in progress endorsed by Geometric Abstraction, and had been a dominant figure in the art field in previous decades. Expressing the contradictions of a period that was increasingly showing signs of violence, artists involved in that movement started mistrusting the idea of scientific and technological progress as an engine of art evolution and became suspicious of the consequences for Venezuela, littered with industrial waste and perishable works. González was a forerunner in the use of scrap metal and industrial waste to create hybrid works that fluctuate between figurative sculpture and abstract painting. In his work, as in other Informalist works, he sought to portray a dynamic present littered with waste and industrial trash.
His photography series include: La protesta en la calle (demonstrations, graffiti, and meetings, 1963); Asfalto-infierno (marginal places in urban environments, such as cemeteries, brothels, and jails, 1962); and Una lectura de la calle: Autopista Caracas-Valencia (dead dogs on the road, 1978–79), exhibited at the Galería Cruz del Sur, in Caracas.
Salvador Garmendia (1928–2001), the writer of novels, narratives, and short stories, was involved with El Techo de la Ballena. He was a member of the Venezuelan communist party in the late 1940s; he founded the magazine Tiempo Literario (1948), and his writings were published in local newspapers, such as El Nacional. In 1958 he joined the literary group Sardio, which published a magazine that expressed political freedom during the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez. He published the novel Los pequeños seres (The Little Ones, 1959) through the group’s publishing arm. After Sardio was disbanded because of the political tensions caused by Fidel Castro’s rise to power in Cuba, Garmendia became one of the founders of El Techo de la Ballena, where he published his novels Los Habitantes (The Inhabitants, 1961), Día de ceniza (A Day of Ashes, 1963), La Mala Vida (Bad Living), and his first book of stories. He worked on his novels in those days, exploring urban themes (people in states of alienation and torment) and nooks and crannies. In the early 1970s he was given a scholarship to study in Barcelona, where he wrote Los Escondites (The Hideouts), which garnered him the National Literature Prize and recognition as part of the “boom” in Latin American literature. Midway through that decade, he started writing stories, short stories, essays, and film and soap opera scripts.
For more texts about González’s work and El Techo de la Ballena in the ICAA Digital Archives, see the following: “[Hay ciertos rostros de la ciudad...]” (1060288); “Cierta ballena” (1279483); “Dos años de la ballena” (866170); “[Establecer una frontera entre lo cursi y lo pavoso...]” (1059586); “Investigación de las basuras” (1060324); “Las "Instituciones de cultura" nos roban el oxígeno, afirman” (1060199), and “La pintura de Carlos Contramaestre” (868632).
