The People’s Graphics Republic.

To my South American friends, to my Andalusian teacher and to the political refugees that made of Mexico a better and more cosmopolitan place and a reason to be proud.

Latin American art hasn’t been able to distance itself from the contradictions and the extreme social contrasts of the region. Democracy has been too weak to confront these problems. Military force and corruption have been used by the United States and the local oligarchies to defend their interests. The impossibility of social justice through democratic change has lead to armed struggle. The CIA sponsored military coup in Guatemala that ousted Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 fostered the radicalization of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara. The assassination of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 was another hard blow to democracy. On the other hand the dictatorship of the proletarian brought by guerrilla insurrection did not result in the promised liberation. While trying to solve some perennial problems it generated new ones.

Now the White House and the CIA are busy fighting the lethal Islamic fundamentalism they propped against the atheism of dialectic materialism. This has resulted in the fostering of democracy but certainly not in the Middle East. The lack of attention to Latin America has allowed inconceivable democratic changes in Chile, Brasil, Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina and Mexico for good or bad. Urban guerrillas like the Tupamaros (now in their seventies) are being elected to solve the social inequalities and the crisis brought by the neoliberal utopia. The possibility of democracy has allowed the return of exiled intellectuals and the legal prosecution of former dictators. There is not a worst example of the failure of the recipes of the International Monetary Fund than Argentina. The Paris commune, the Spanish civil war and the Mexican revolution generated graphic art in response to political needs of the moment. The Argentinean rebellion is no exception and from it the Taller Popular de Serigrafía (Popular Silkscreen Workshop) is born.

The TPS organized in the popular insurrection during the 19th and the 20th of December in Buenos Aires in 2001. It was funded in the popular assembly of San Telmo. The members of the group are: Diego Posadas, Mariela Scafati, Magdalena Jitrik, Guillermo Ueno, Catalina León, Julia Masvernat, Omar Lang, Pablo Rosales, Christian Wloch, Eduardo Arauz, Fernando Brizuela, Juani Neumann, Horacio Abram Luján, Leo Rocco, Carolina Katz, Karina Granieri, Verónica Di Toro, Daniel Sanjurjo, Gonzalo Gomila y Ana di Toro. These artists have presented their graphic work in the frequent demonstrations, “piquetes” (a particular kind of demonstration where the streets are blocked by the unemployed), expropriations of factories by their workers, galleries, museums and boutiques. They take the streets with their screens printing posters, t-shirts, banners and any available surface. The projects respond directly to the context and the moment. They make specific reference to marches or certain incidents like the murder of the “piquetero” Dario Santillán or the taking of the Bruckman factory by its workers. The designs are usually simple, monochrome and direct. They often include drawings, diagrams and occasionally photographic images. These ones interact with founded images and texts once they are printed over the original designs of the t-shirts worn by the people attending the protests. These situationists interventions often culture jam the logos and colors of soccer clubs or sometimes even of other political propaganda. The t-shirts and other printed material become relics and souvenirs of political participation. The “piqueteros” use them and collect them like groupies do with the ones from the concerts they assist of their favorite bands. By participating in these events you become an agent of dissemination of the message. The fashion victims without interest in direct political participation and with disposable income can acquire printed clothing in galleries, art spaces and boutiques.

Historically the graphic arts have been an ideal mean to massively reproduce and distribute messages and art geared for the wide audience of the streets. The Taller de Serigrafía Popular takes its name from the Taller de la Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphics Workshop) that used lithography, the letterpress, woodcuts and mostly linocuts to print flyers in post-revolutionary Mexico. Nevertheless the collective practice and street action has perhaps more to do with the art produced by different collectives known as the “grupos” in Mexico City in the seventies. Of particular interest is perhaps the Grupo Suma and their use of alternative graphic techniques (known in Mexico at the time as “neográfica”) such as the mimeograph, Xeroxes and stencils. Around those years happened the exile in Mexico of South American artists such as Magdalena Jitrik that allowed such cross-pollinations across the Americas. Aesthetically the artwork of TPS ranges in influences from South American and Russian constructivism, the graphics of the 68 student movements (both the French and the Mexican) and a punk DIY spirit. The texts and the images are often done by hand contrasting with dominant digital design. An example would be their drawing of the Argentinean map done with recent names of victims of police brutality.

Nowadays the streets and the public space are the domain of certain artists. Ex graffiti artists such as Shepard Fairey, Acamonchi, Toffer and others now design posters and stickers used to mark territory almost as an end in itself from San Diego to New York. Buenos Aires in fact has the most interesting sprayed stenciled images I have seen. In Tijuana t-shirts along with stickers and electronic music have become the preferred outlets of a sub culture that responds to its complicated social reality more elliptically and with less urgency. Gestures like rolling a plasticine ball around the city or doing marks with the water of a puddle with a bicycle have been exported from Latin America as some sort of new “Arte Povera” (and it is in a literal sense) with successful opportunism. Curators and collectors fill with imagination the void of significance carefully negated in this corny, inoffensive and domesticated pseudo conceptualism. By doing that they pretend to respond to the political pressure of a cultural reality whose existence cannot be denied. Like the best “corridos” and rap songs the TPS creates an important historical memory and broadcasts the news from the street. It reminds us that conceptual practice was born to challenge the market and to link action with ideas. We should recognize that this democratic and self-managed action is done through the production and printing of images and the exchange and collection of objects. Silkscreen was once considered an impersonal, cold, industrial process. Now in times of the Internet and of televised political propaganda it seems more like a craft and its reach more limited and particular. In other words useful for the creative exercise and a collective artistic practice.



Appendix: During the seventies Mexico was a safe heaven for political refuges. Chileans, Uruguayans, Argentineans, Bolivians, Haitians arrived as Spaniards did in the forties escaping military dictatorships and torture. My grammar school and high school became cosmopolitan and international. My first art teacher Eugenia lost her teeth because she had received electrical shocks in her gums given by Chilean soldiers. A lot of these people went back to South America as I was coming to Los Angeles, Going to Buenos Aires has been a rendezvous with the Mexico of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. The place where I grew up and that I remember.