Violence [50 años] 1973/2023: A Reflection on the Perpetuity of Violence

“Violence [50 años] 1973/2023”, by Juan Carlos Romero, can be visited until August 4 at W—gallery

What is violence? It is, at the same time, a question as central as elusive and desperate. It is like the air. Violence is. The violence is It can be defined in different ways. Today he is in Paris in the anti-police riots that kept the City of Light in suspense and in the routes blocked by teachers, workers and indigenous peoples in Jujuy, repressed by the state order. But the violence was always there. Karl Marx said: “Violence is the midwife of history.”

In September 2001, the great composer Karlheinz Stockhausen wanted to see the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York as “the greatest work of art of all time.” That act of terror that inaugurated the century was seen from the aesthetic point of view and the monumentality of the act itself, outside of the reactionary political manifestation that it represented.

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It was not original. The Italian Futurists had named war as their guiding act. The Futurist Manifesto, written by Filippo Marinetti in 1909, said: “We want to glorify war —the only hygiene in the world—, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the ideas for which one dies and the contempt for women ”. The most consistent futurists enlisted in the ranks of the Italian army in the Great War and did not return alive. The rest was integrated as an artistic vanguard encouraged by Duce Mussolini and fascism from 1923.

Juan Carlos Romero inaugurated the exhibition “Violencia” in 1973, an already classic work of political-conceptual art

Today the woke culture could label as violence any sign that differs from the thinking of “political correctness”.

Today, a Milei (in Argentina, but in Spain a spokesperson for Vox; in the United States a Trump supporter; in Bolivia, a separatist from Santa Cruz) can say, without getting upset, that the sale of organs should be allowed freely, released to the market.

Gertrude Stein said: “a rose is a rose is a rose”. She could have said: “a violence is a violence is a violence”.

Further here, our poet Néstor Perlongher wrote “Cadáveres”.

“In what pushes / what chokes, / In what swallows / what embeds, / In what amputates / what impales, / In what whore! / There are corpses”.

What is violence? How to say it. Fifty years ago, the artist Juan Carlos Romero inaugurated the exhibition Violencia in a downtown gallery. Today it is a classic reference of political-conceptual art in our country, and it returns to the same scene of its installation in 1973, in the renovated W.

The works of Juan Carlos Romero always had a strong political imprint

Half a century passed. If the questions that the sample asked in that convulsive 1973 were urgent, today they do not abandon the reasons for those concerns, although the answers vary in degree and form. Everything changes, as Heraclitus pointed out so long ago.

The scene is shocking. The word “VIOLENCE” in thick typeface, black on white- Repeated the word that becomes a mantra, receives the visitor, who then immerses himself in the detail of the news published in weeklies of that time and in the framework, So, from a period climate.

Urban uprisings, union conflicts, state repression but also the police murder of criminals are described, whose corpses are shown as models of death to the photojournalistic cameras. In general terms, nothing very different from the present. Nothing very different from the popular uprising against the constitutional reform of Gerardo Morales in Jujuy or the murder of the kid Lucas González in Barracas for the crime of being “black”.

“Violencia”, by Juan Carlos Romero, is reopened after 50 years in the same space where it was exhibited for the first time

The differences? A note tells how in Tucumán, after a homily by ten Third World priests in the middle of a union conflict, the mass ended in confrontations: protesters and their barricades confronted the police in the center of the city.

The unsigned texts on display explore the historical and philosophical origin of violence, while press reproductions give meat to written theory. All while the word “VIOLENCE” resounds on the walls, on the floor, everywhere.

Romero, from a working-class family, had been a telephone operator before entering the Fine Arts degree at the University of La Plata. He took part in renowned group shows in those troubled times, such as the Van Riedel Homage to Vietnam exhibition in 1967. In 1971 he held shows in which he experimented with mechanical elements at the Center for Art and Communication (CAyC), where in 1973 he would inaugurate Violence, in the same building where the exhibition is set up again today. It should be noted that at that time, the geographical coordinates coincided with the proximity to Di Tella, the Florida Garden, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters. Unlike today, a region furrowed by the office.

In “Violencia”, Romero exposes in detail the news published in weeklies of the time, circa 1973

That 1973 had witnessed the brief spring of Cámpora, after the fall of the dictatorship inaugurated in 1966 by Onganía, and the rise of the working class in cities such as Rosario and Córdoba, where the struggle for political demands led to mass demonstrations. . The photos chosen by Romero give an account of these booms. He also shows how the armed organizations, which claimed to be the leadership of these movements, had replaced the political leadership with the rubric of rifles and unexplained military adventures. Violence was like “Pascal’s sphere”, whose limits were everywhere but whose center was nowhere.

After being general secretary of the Single Union of Plastic Artists between 1975 and 1976, Romero went into exile in Honduras. Upon returning from him, he did not stop his artistic activity characterized by a strong political imprint that unfolds in a work, and that is maintained.

1973-2023. Fifty years is not short, but still, violence continues to traverse the rhythm of our history, to different degrees, with various nuances, with different perspectives and future possibilities not yet seen. The work of Juan Carlos Romero reverberates in its power. And he points out that if there is something certain, it is that class society incubates, even embryonicly (almost only as a heartbeat), the potential civil war. Perhaps, with the risks and possibilities that this implies.

The word “VIOLENCIA” in thick typeface welcomes the visitor to the Juan Carlos Romero exhibition

*Violence [50 años] 1973/2023, by Juan Carlos Romero, can be visited until August 4 at W—galería, Viamonte 452, Buenos Aires, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

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2023-07-09 08:09:37
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